Dassault has completed a flight test using a new FLIR Systems infrared camera (photos below) designed to differentiate between laminar flows and the more typical turbulent flows on a wing.
Part of the "Smart Fixed Wing Aircraft" effort under the European Clean Sky research programme, the equipment and analyses are precursors to planned "smart laminar wing" flight tests in 2014 on specially modified Airbus A340-300 by Airbus, Dassault and other partners.
In the recent test at Dassault's flight test centre in Istres, France,
the company modified the right horizontal stabilizer of a Falcon 7X with
a black covering and mounted the IR camera, which senses minute changes
in temperature in the flow, to look down on the surface from the top of
the horizontal tail. Read more...
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