Inversion method for measuring multi-hole probe surface pressure distribution of supersonic compressible atmospheric flow field

Abstract

The conventional method of measuring a multi-hole probe is based on Bernoulli’s equation and suffers from certain model errors. A computational fluid dynamics (CFD)-based method was used in this study to reduce the theoretical error and establish a parametric model of the surface pressure of a spherical multi-hole pressure probe for measuring compressible flow fields at supersonic velocities. A flow field inversion method based on the parametric model is proposed herein. Numerical simulations were conducted to validate the proposed method. The experiment results show that in the compressible atmospheric flow field within Mach 1.2–1.7, the measurement errors of the inversion method were 1.3% and 2.35% for velocity and angle, respectively, thus verifying the feasibility of the method. Thus, a new method of measuring multi-hole pressure probe atmospheric flow fields was demonstrated.