Impulse Facilities for the Simulation of Hypersonic Radiating Flows

“…At the expense of test time, total enthalpy and total pressure are added to the flow without the flow dissociation that would occur in a shock tunnel. 18 The X2 expansion tube at the University of Queensland has been used extensively to simulate and measure radiating test flows for several planetary bodies in the solar system, including Earth, Mars, Titan, and Venus, [20][21][22][23][24][25][26] at velocities ranging from 6 -12 km/s. However, when considering simulating entries into the gas giant planets in the outer reaches of the solar system, velocities range from 20 -50 km/s, pushing the performance envelope limits of expansion tubes as they are currently configured, and requiring a firm understanding of the performance trends of the facilities to create useful test conditions.…”

Section: The X2 Expansion Tubementioning

confidence: 99%

On the Current Limits of Simulating Gas Giant Entry Flows in an Expansion Tube

James¹,

Gildfind²,

Morgan³

et al. 2015

20th AIAA International Space Planes and Hypersonic Systems and Technologies Conference

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“…The expansion tube is thought to be well suited to this task because this type of test facility is principally used for studying planetary entry phenomena for the other planets in our solar system. [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23] This is because of the expansion tube's ability to accelerate a test flow to superorbital conditions without ionising it by processing the test flow with a shock wave and then an unsteady expansion instead of just a shock wave. 24 Primarily, this paper examines whether an expansion tube can be used to create test conditions relevant to the proposed missions to Uranus and Saturn [8][9][10] by using excess performance available from its high powered free piston driver, and the extra performance gained by using a light hydrogen and helium test gas.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Generating High Speed Earth Re-entry Test Conditions in an Expansion Tube for Interplanetary Return Missions

James¹,

Lewis²,

Gildfind³

et al. 2019

Proceedings of the 32nd International Symposium on Shock Waves (ISSW32 2019)

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In 2010, planetary entry probe missions to Uranus and Saturn were proposed. This paper details an investigation exploring the operating limits of the X2 superorbital expansion tube at the University of Queensland for the simulation of test conditions related to these proposed entries. Theoretical calculations showed that X2 could recreate the stagnation enthalpy of the proposed 22.3 km/s Uranus entry but not the stagnation enthalpy of the proposed 26.9 km/s Saturn entry. Experiments were able to confirm the theoretical performance calculations. However, losses caused some of the experimental shock speeds to be up to 10% slower than predicted, and due to the high velocity nature of the experiments, the shock speed errors were large making it difficult to properly quantify the test conditions. Further theoretical analysis investigated the possibility of using a more powerful free piston driver to simulate the Saturn entry conditions, and the analysis showed that with a slightly more powerful driver than X2's current most powerful configuration, the stagnation enthalpy of the proposed Saturn entry or other slightly faster entries proposed in the literature could be simulated. However, a very powerful driver would be required to recreate the stagnation enthalpies of these entries with the excess enthalpy needed to perform binary scaled experiments for an X2 sized facility.

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Impulse Facilities for the Simulation of Hypersonic Radiating Flows

Cited by 27 publications

References 12 publications

Radiative Heat Transfer Measurements in Low-Density Titan Atmospheres

Radiative Heat Transfer Measurements in Low-Density Titan Atmospheres

On the Current Limits of Simulating Gas Giant Entry Flows in an Expansion Tube

Generating High Speed Earth Re-entry Test Conditions in an Expansion Tube for Interplanetary Return Missions

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