Paper Airplane Wind Tunnel

A folded paper plane glides through a wireframe wind tunnel while color-coded streamlines reveal the invisible airflow moving past its wings and fuselage. In a real wind tunnel, engineers hold a scale model still and blow air past it (or, equivalently, move the model through still air) to study lift, the upward force generated as air deflects around the wing, and drag, the resistance that opposes forward motion. Streamline color here encodes local air speed: blue is slow-moving, undisturbed air, while cyan-to-red marks air accelerated and compressed as it squeezes around the plane's wings and body. Watch how the lines bunch up, curve, and speed up (shifting toward red) right around the wingtips and fuselage, then relax back to blue downstream as the wake dissipates — that curvature and color shift is exactly what aerodynamicists look for when evaluating how a shape performs. Wind tunnel testing like this lets engineers refine aircraft, cars, and even buildings before committing to expensive physical prototypes.
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Wind Tunnel Controls

Wind Speed: 6.0 m/s Turbulence Intensity: 1.0x Airplane Pitch: 0.00 rad