Experimental Methods for the Characterization of Aerothermal Interaction Phenomena in Hypersonics

Abstract

Reliable experimental data from ground and flight tests is critical for improving physical models and validating design tools for hypersonic applications. Hypersonic flight experiments for space applications are rare and conducting them on a large scale is expensive. Therefore, ground tests and full-scale flight experiments with sounding rockets remain the main sources of validation data that need to be extrapolated to the full-scale flight environment. This requires the combined use of advanced measurement techniques for experiments and complementary numerical simulations with validated codes. This talk is dedicated to the discussion of selected experimental results related to aerothermal interaction phenomena, including thermo-mechanical and chemical fluid-structure coupling in hypersonic flow environments.