The HIRENASD experiment was conducted in 2006 in the European Transonic Wind Tunnel (ETW) under the auspices of RWTH Aachen, as part of the German Research Foundation special research area 401. The Institute of Aeroelasticity contributed significantly to the execution of this experiment. It used a swept wing configuration with supercritical aerofoil, which was analysed under transonic Mach and Reynolds numbers that are considered relevant to commercial transport aircraft. The setup included a piezo actuator on the wing root that was used to generate bending and torsional oscillations in the natural frequency of the wing.
Following the wind tunnel experiment, the Institute conducted extensive numerical analyses to validate the TAU code for unsteady, motion-induced aerodynamic forces.