Seminars

High-enthalpy facilities provide the opportunity for flight-matched high-speed ground testing. These ground test facilities, for example free-piston driven shock tunnels/expansion tubes, have a long legacy of providing accurate test conditions to develop flight-experiments and providing fundamental data for validation of simulations. The other major benefit of such facilities is the relatively lower cost of operation and their versatility in spanning a range of conditions, often much furthermore than what a typical flight experiment can achieve. However, despite these many benefits some drawbacks do exist, namely in terms of the available test time which is typically of the order of several hundreds of microseconds to several milliseconds. Prior tests have shown that this is sufficient for establishing steady test conditions for aerodynamic/supersonic test conditions that match well with flight experiments. However, the experimental model surfaces in these ground tests will not be able to attain the surface temperatures typically witnessed in high-speed flight experiments owing to the short test durations. This can impact the physics of key phenomena (supersonic combustion modes, turbulence/transition studies, shock-boundary-layer-interactions, re-entry flow studies, ablation studies etc) being interrogated. Hence, to compensate for this, recent experiments within the Centre for Hypersonics at UQ have been focusing on developing the capability to heat the experimental models prior to initiating the test-runs. In this talk, Prof. Veeraragavan will discuss many of these experiments and showcase how model heating was achieved for different types of experiments/phenomena exploration.