Aeroheating Test of Double Cone Configurations in Shock Tunnel

Abstract

Double cone is a commonly used axial symmetric configuration in numerical and experimental studies to simulate complex flow with shock/shock and shock/boundary layer interactions [1–4]. For hypersonic vehicle thermal protection system design, interactions between the bow shock with the shock waves generated by the wing or control surface and between shock wave and boundary layer must be considered of primary concern because it may cause severe local heating load. Double cones with different cone corners become a good choice for aerothermodynamic researchers to investigate the complex heating distribution caused by different kinds of shock interactions. It is critical to accurately determine the spatially continuous heat flux distributions on double cone model surface for understanding of complex flow mechanisms and for comparison with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) predictions, but it is difficult to get the detailed aerodynamic heating data with traditional point measurement techniques, which use separately located thin film gauges or coaxial thermocouples to get the heat flux value on the point. Temperature-sensitive paint (TSP) technique, a global heating measurement technique, makes acquiring such data possible. In this work, a new developed fast-responding TSP system [5] is used to measure the global heat flux distributions on two double cone models in shock tunnel, and the results are compared with the data from thin film gauges and CFD predictions. The main objective of this experiment is to develop experience in the application of TSP in the shock tunnel testing environment and to evaluate the effectiveness of the different measurement and computation techniques in the complex flow field.