Improvement of Temperature-Sensitive Paint Formulation for Heating with Infrared Laser

Abstract

Temperature-Sensitive Paint (TSP) is a useful optical measurement technique for visualizing the boundary-layer transition on a model surface It is important to generate a relatively rapid change between the flow and the model surface temperature, and TSP surface heating with an Infrared (IR) diode laser is one of the useful methods. In this study, the influence of additive IR absorption molecules to the TSP coating that improve the temperature change and homogeneous heating was investigated. First, the influence of the IR absorber to the TSP properties was investigated in the laboratory using the paint calibration system. Subsequently, the efficiency of the TSP surface heating was demonstrated in the ambient low-speed wind tunnel with different formulations of TSP layers. The selected formulation of the TSP coating with IR absorber was afterwards applied on a large wind tunnel model and tested in ETW.