Development of Temperature Sensitive Paints in the High Enthalpy Shock Tunnel Göttingen, HEG

Abstract

The precise experimental determination of the heat loads acting on vehicles traveling at hypersonic speeds is crucial for the design of the vehicle’s thermal protection system. Computational fluid dynamics methods provide increasingly powerful possibilities for the simulation of such hypersonic configurations. Nevertheless, the difficulties s in the accurate modelling of high-temperature effects in chemically reacting flows, boundary-layer transition and shock-wave/boundary-layer interactions, mean that ground-based testing will remain an important tool for evaluating the heating levels encountered by high-speed vehicles for the foreseeable future. The High Enthalpy Shock Tunnel Göttingen (HEG) of the German Aerospace Center (DLR), capable of performing such testing, is one of the major European hypersonic test facilities. It was commissioned for use in 1991 and has been utilized since then extensively in a large number of national and international space and hypersonic flight projects.