Experiments on a smooth wall hypersonic boundary layer at Mach 6

Abstract

The turbulent boundary layer along the surface of high-speed vehicles drives shear stress and heat flux. Although essential to the vehicle design, the understanding of compressible turbulent boundary layers at high Mach numbers is limited due to the lack of available data. This is particularly true if the surface is rough, which is typically the case for all technical surfaces. To validate a methodological approach, as initial step, smooth wall experiments were performed. A hypersonic turbulent boundary layer at Ma = 6 (Ma_e = 5.4) along a 7° sharp cone model at low Reynolds numbers Re_theta = 3000 was characterized. The mean velocities in the boundary layer were acquired by means of Pitot pressure and particle image velocimetry (PIV) measurements. Furthermore, the PIV data were used to extract turbulent intensities along the profile. The mean velocities in the boundary layer agree with numerical data, independent of the measurement technique. Based on the profile data, three different approaches to extract the skin friction velocity were applied and show favorable comparison to literature and numerical data. The extracted values were used for inner and outer scaling of the van Driest transformed velocity profiles which are in good agreement to incompressible theoretical data. Morkovin scaled turbulent intensities show ambiguous results compared to literature data which may be influenced by inflow turbulence level, particle lag and other measurement uncertainties.