Hypersonic mixing and combustion studies in the GASL HYPULSE facility

Hypervelocity heat-transfer measurements in an expansion tube

“…Sphere-cone wake flow establishment required on the order of 60 6 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics flow-path lengths in CO 2 and 70 in air, and the wake heat-transfer uncertainty was estimated to be no more than ±15%. Navier-Stokes computations were found to agree with the experimental data to within 10% in CO 2 and 25% in air for the wake heating rates. For the hemispheres and 70 deg sphere-cone forebodies, agreement was within 10% in air and 7% in CO 2 .…”

“…The total test period was then taken to be the time over which the wall pressure varied by no more than ±5% from the average value over the 100 µsec interval. Based on the application of this criterion to all of the CO 2 and air runs conducted in this research, the average steady-state run duration for heat-transfer testing at the Langley conditions was found to be 150 µsec for CO 2 and 125 µsec for air. These values are more conservative than the quoted nominal values, but as the heating data were intended for comparison with computational results, the ±5% pressure deviation criteria was imposed in order to minimize the uncertainty in the freestream flow conditions.…”

“…Because surface heating rates were observed to be very sensitive to variations in the freestream conditions, a small acceptable magnitude of deviation in the wall pressure was stipulated, and consequently the accepted test durations were shorter than the nominal times. Typical wall-pressure timehistories for CO 2 and air runs are shown in Figs. 3 and 4.…”

“…HYPULSE is used in the study of high-temperature, chemically-reacting internal and external flows, such as that inside a scramjet 2 or around a planetary entry vehicle 3 . Data from these studies can match or be extrapolated to flight conditions, or can be employed in the validation of computational fluid dynamics codes.…”

Experimental supersonic combustion research at NASA Langley

“…This need led to the reactivation of several pulse facilities, among which was the NASA HYpersonic PULSE (HYPULSE) shock-expansion tube (SETb), that came on-line in 1988. [23][24][25] The remaining sections of this paper will include highlights of the experimental supersonic combustion work at LaRC from 1986, including a review of the test facilities, engine flowpath tests, scramjet component tests and supporting research, and some areas of experimental scramjet research of current interest.…”