Investigation of Slender Bodies at Hypersonic Mach Numbers

Abstract

Tests were carried in a shock tunnel to determine the heating rate and the wall pressure on a test model flying at hypersonic velocity. The experiments were performed at Mach M = 6.5 and a total enthalpy of 1.2 MJ/kg. Helium was used as the driver gas and air as the driven gas. The effective test time during the tunnel testing was 3.5 ms. The vacuum sputtered gages were used to evaluate the heating rate on the test model. The evaluated heating rate agrees well with numerical simulation. The experimentally measured pressure also agrees with computational fluid dynamics