Technique for studying ablation-products transport in supersonic boundary layers by using PLIF of naphthalene

Abstract

A technique is developed that uses planar laser-induced fluorescence (PLIF) of sublimated gas-phase naphthalene to visualize the transport of ablation products in a high-speed turbulent boundary layer. The naphthalene is molded into a rectangular insert that is mounted flush with the floor of a Mach 5 wind tunnel, where the test gas is air. The naphthalene fluorescence is excited with 266 nm laser light, and broadband detection of the emitted light is used. Using spectroscopic data from a previous study and a first-order approximation for the mean temperature profile across the boundary layer, naphthalene PLIF images collected in a Mach 5 turbulent boundary layer are converted into two-dimensional fields of naphthalene mole fraction with an instantaneous uncertainty of ±20 %. These quantitative naphthalene PLIF images in the Mach 5 boundary layer reveal large-scale naphthalene vapor structures that are regularly ejected out to wall distances of approximately y/δ = 0.6 for a field of view that spans 3δ–5δ downstream of the trailing edge of the naphthalene insert. The magnitude of the calculated naphthalene mole fraction in these structures at y/δ = 0.2 ranges from approximately 1 to 6 % of the saturation mole fraction at the wind tunnel recovery temperature and static pressure. Mean mole fraction profiles taken at different streamwise locations collapse into one “universal” mole fraction profile when properly normalized and are in agreement with previous scalar dispersion measurements. The results indicate that PLIF of sublimating naphthalene can be an effective tool for studying scalar transport in supersonic and hypersonic flows.