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Hypervelocity shock standoff on spheres in air

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Abstract

To provide data for the validation of computational fluid dynamics models, measurements of the shock standoff distance on spheres in hypervelocity flows have been made. Test flows of air at 8.7 and 9.7 km/s were generated in the X2 expansion tunnel fitted with a Mach 10 nozzle. High-speed video images were analysed with a least-squares shape-fitting algorithm. Assuming a spherical shock shape near the nose enabled increased resolution measurements beyond the native pixel size. Normalised shock standoff distances, \(\Delta \)/\(D\), in the range 0.03–0.04 were measured, with sphere diameters, \(D\), of 40, 60 and 80 mm.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Hypersonics, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

    F. Zander, R. J. Gollan & R. G. Morgan

  2. Queensland Geothermal Energy Centre of Excellence, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

    P. A. Jacobs

Authors
  1. F. Zander
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  2. R. J. Gollan
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  3. P. A. Jacobs
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  4. R. G. Morgan
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Correspondence to F. Zander.

Additional information

Communicated by K. Hannemann.

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Zander, F., Gollan, R.J., Jacobs, P.A. et al. Hypervelocity shock standoff on spheres in air. Shock Waves 24, 171–178 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00193-013-0488-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00193-013-0488-x

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