Numerical & experimental study to evaluate the performance of Universiti Tenaga Nasional short duration hypersonic test facility

Abstract

The work of this paper is aimed to investigate the parameters that affect the performance of a short-duration hypersonic test facility that build at the Universiti Tenaga Nasional "UNITEN" in Malaysia. The facility has been designed, constructed, and commissioned for different values of diaphragm pressure ratios and different gas combinations. The applications and reasoning behind building such a facility are explained. The governing equations for the shock wave are presented. A theoretical model was developed to evaluate the shock wave strength P 2/P 1 values as a function of diaphragm pressure ratio P 4/P 1 for different driver/driven gas combinations. A two-dimensional time-accurate time-marching Navier-Stokes solver for shock wave applications is described. It uses second-order accurate cell-vertex finitevolume spatial discretization and fourth order accurate Runge- Kutta temporal integration. Experimental tests for different operating conditions have been accomplished. A high precision pressure transducer and an in house made thermocouple were used to measure the pressure history which represents the shock wave strength P 2/P 1 and the surface temperature change profile during the facility operation. A MATLAB numerical transient heat transfer model was developed to evaluate the heat flux from the surface temperature change history. The calculated parameters which are pressure, temperature and shock wave velocity, and the CFD results were found to be much matched comparable to the experimental results.