Here we review the advantages and disadvantages of using highly compressed air and other working fluids to test submarines and aircraft at full-scale Reynolds numbers. The conclusions are based on the design and implementation of two facilities at Princeton: the DARPA/ONR Superpipe apparatus built at Princeton to enable accurate pipe flow measurements over three orders of magnitude in Reynolds numbers, and the ONR High Reynolds Number Testing Facility (HRTF), designed to test submarine models at 1/5th full-scale Reynolds numbers.
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Smits et al. (2005) studied this question.