Development of an Experiment for Measuring Film Cooling Performance in Supersonic Flows

Abstract

This thesis describes the development of an experiment for acquiring supersonic film cooling performance data in canonical configurations suitable for code validation. A methodology for selecting appropriate experimental conditions is developed and used to select test conditions in the UMD atmospheric pressure wind tunnel that are relevant to film cooling conditions encountered in the J-2X rocket engine. A new technique for inferring wall heat flux with 10% uncertainty from temperature-time histories of embedded sensors is developed and implemented. Preliminary heat flux measurements on the uncooled upper wall and on the lower wall with the film cooling flow turned off suggest that RANS solvers using Menter's SST model are able to predict heat flux within 15% in the far-field (> 10 injection slot heights) but are very inaccurate in the near-field. However, more experiments are needed to confirm this finding. Preliminary Schlieren images showing the shear layer growth rate are also presented.