I tested a NACA 2414 airfoil in Taylor University's wind tunnel with Ben Lisenby and Austin Jones, supervised by Dr. Marco Bernardes. We measured drag at angles of attack from 0° to 28° at about 4.6 m/s using a strain-gauge mount, and ran matching simulations in Autodesk CFD with a k-ω SST model. We also calculated Reynolds numbers to compare with published data.

Comparing methods, wind-tunnel results differed from literature by about 23.4%, while CFD differed from our experiments by about 46.4%. The project highlighted issues in low-speed testing: tunnel wall effects, mounting interference, low Reynolds numbers, and difficulty modeling flow near stall.