Ph. D.

An investigation was conducted to design instruments to directly measure skin friction along the chamber walls of supersonic combustor models. Measurements were made in a combustor at the General Applied Science Laboratory (GASL) and in the Direct Connect Arcjet Facility (DCAF) supersonic combustor at the NASA AMES Research Center. Flow conditions in the high enthalpy combustor models ranged from total pressures of 275-800 psia (1900-5550 kPa) and total temperatures from 5800-8400 R (3222-4667 K). This gives enthalpies in the range of 1700-3300 BTU/Ib_m (3950-7660 KJ/kg) and simulated flight Mach number from 9 to 13. A direct force measurement device was used to measure the small tangential shear force resulting from the flow passing over a non-intrusive floating element. The floating head is mounted to a stiff cantilever beam arrangement with deflection due to the shear force on the order of 0.0005 in (0.0125 mm). This small deflection allows the balance to be a non-nulling type. Several measurements were conducted in cold supersonic flows to verify the concept and establish accuracy and repeatability. This balance design includes actively controlled cooling of the floating sensor head temperature through an internal cooling system to eliminate nonuniform temperature effects between the head and the surrounding chamber wall. This enabled the device to be suitable for shear force measurement in very hot flows. The key to this device is the use of a quartz tube cantilever with strain gages bonded at orthogonal positions directly on the surface at the base. A symmetric fluid flow was developed inside the quartz tube to provide cooling to the backside of the floating head. Bench tests showed that this did not influence the force measurement. Numerical heat transfer calculations were conducted for design feasibility and analysis, and to determine the effectiveness of the active cooling of the floating head. Analysis of the measurement uncertainty in cold supersonic flow tests show that uncertainty under 8% is achievable, but variations in the balance cooling during a particular test raised uncertainty up to 20% in these very hot flows during the early tests. Improvements to the strain gages and balance cooling reduced uncertainty for the later tests to under 15%. / Ph. D.

Experiments were performed with two different helium injector models at different injector transverse and yaw angles in order to determine the mixing rate and core penetration of the injectant and the flow field total pressure losses. when gaseous injection occurs into a supersonic freestream. Tested in the Virginia Tech supersonic tunnel. with a freestream Mach number of 3.0 and conditions corresponding to a freestream Reynolds number of 5.0 x 107 1m. was a single. sonic. 5X underexpanded, helium jet at a downstream angle of 30° relative to the freestream. This injector was rotated from 0° to _28° to test the effects of injector yaw. The second model was an array of three supersonic, 5X underexpanded helium injectors with an exit Mach number of 1.7 and a transverse angle of 15°. This model was tested in the NASA Langley Mach 6.0, High Reynolds number tunnel, with freestream conditions corresponding to a Reynolds number of 5.4 x 10⁷ /m. The injector array as tested at yaw angles of 0° and -15°. Surface flow visualization showed that significant flow asymmetries were produced by injector yaw. Nanosecond exposure shadowgraph pictures were taken, showing the gaseous injection plume to be unsteady, and further studies demonstrated this unsteadiness was related to shock waves orthogonal to the injectant bow shock, that were generated at a frequency of 30 kHz. The primary data technique used, was a concentration probe which measured the molar concentration of helium in the flow field. Concentration data and other meanflow data was taken at several downstream axial stations and yielded contours of helium concentration, total pressure, Mach number, velocity, and mass flux, as well as the static properties. From these contour plots, the various mixing rates for each case were determined. The injectant mixing rates, expressed as the maximum concentration decay, and mixing distances were found to be unaffected by injector yaw, in the Mach 3.0 experiments, but were adversely affected by injector yaw in the Mach 6.0 experiments. One promising aspect of injector yaw was the that as the yaw angle was increased, lateral motion of the injectant plume became significant, and the turbulent mixing region area increased by approximately 34%. Comparisons of the 15° transverse angled injection into a Mach 6.0 flow to previous experiments with 15° injection into a Mach 3.0 freestream, demonstrated that there is a significant decrease in initial mixing, at Mach 6.0, resulting in a much longer mixing distance. From a parametric computational study of the Mach 6.0 experiments, the effects of adjacent injectors was found to decrease lateral spreading while increasing the vertical penetration of the injectant plume, and marginally increasing the injectant core decay rate. Matching of the computational results to the experimental results was best achieved when using the Baldwin-Lomax turbulence model without the Degani-Schiff modification. / Ph. D.

This thesis documents an experimental investigation of the base (trailing edge) pressure and its approximate distribution on a transonic turbine blade. Since the base pressure plays an important role in determining the profile loss on blades with thick trailing edges, both the base pressure and the blade losses are presented for a range of transonic exit Mach numbers. The overall objective of this work is to provide experimental data for improving current computer-based models used in designing turbine blades. The two-dimensional cascade was tested in the VPI&SU Transonic Cascade Wind Tunnel, a blow-down type of tunnel facility. The blade design for the cascade was based on the pitchline profile of the high-pressure turbine in a commercial jet engine with a design exit Mach number of approximately 1.2. In order to carefully instrument the thin trailing edge, the blades used in the experiment were made five times the size of the actual engine blade. With this large-scale blade, five static pressure taps were placed around the trailing edge. In addition to these taps, the rearward portion of the suction surface was also instrumented with five static pressure taps. The aerodynamic losses were quantified by a loss coefficient: the mass-averaged total pressure drop divided by the total pressure upstream of the blade row. These measured pressures were taken with a fixed total pressure probe upstream of the cascade and a pitchwise traversing probe in the downstream position. The cascade was tested for an exit Mach number ranging from 0.70 to 1.40. The results of the experiments indicate a decreasing normalized base pressure (p_B/p_t1) with increasing downstream Mach number (M₂) until the minimum value of p_B/p_t1 = 0.30 at M₂ = 1.30. The approximate base pressure distributions for all transonic downstream Mach numbers indicate nearly uniform pressure around the central 90° of the trailing edge. Results for the profile loss are displayed for exit Mach numbers between 0.70 and 1.35; the trend of increasing loss with decreasing base pressure is shown. The shadowgraph pictures taken reveal the trailing edge region of the flow for several downstream transonic Mach numbers. / Master of Science

Under the assumption of a perfect gas with a constant specific heat ratio, the first approximation of the integral-relations method, which considers the entire shock layer as a single strip, is derived for axisymmetric bodies of arbitrary smooth contour. The resulting differential equations were then applied to a supersonic and hypersonic flow past a paraboloid of revolution. The shock shapes, shock wave detachment distances, locations of sonic lines; and velocity and pressure distributions for the body were calculated for γ = 1.4 and y = 5/3, and at Mach numbers of 3, 4, 6, 10 and 1000. These calculations were carried out on an IBM 1620 electronic computer. The results were compared with those obtained by Van Dyke's inverse method. The agreement between the two methods was found to be good, in view of the fact that only the first approximation of the integral relations method was used. / Master of Science

The panel flutter analysis presented herein has been restricted to the problem of an isolated simply supported plate of uniform thickness. The same type of analysis can be applied, however, to other panel configurations. Clamped panels, integrally stiffened panels, arrays of panels, end others should be amenable to treatment by the model approach based on the static aerodynamic approximation. / Master of Science

This thesis presents the results from measurements taken during the transient unstable operation of an axial-flow transonic core-compressor rotor. The measurements were taken to better understand the unstable flow physics of transonic rotors. The rotor, commonly referred to as Rotor 37, was designed by NASA Lewis to be the first stage of an advanced, eight-stage, core-compressor having a high pressure ratio (about 20:1), good efficiency and sufficient stall margin. The rotor was tested without the presence of a stator (or any of the following seven stages) at the NASA Lewis single-stage, high-speed, core-compressor test-rig. The measurements were obtained with a single circumferential, high-response, total pressure and total temperature probe. The measurements were taken immediately after the machine was ’tripped’ into unstable operation by slowly closing the downstream throttle valve. Measurements were obtained at several different span-wise locations and at two different operating speeds. The rotor was shown to exhibit many of the same characteristics typical of low-speed axial-flow machines. Both rotating stall cells and surge cycles were present during unstable operation. The surge cycles present immediately after the inception of unstable operation involved a large-extent single-cell type rotating stall that was present only during the first half of the surge cycles (the second half of these surge cycles involved operation in the stable operating region). However, as the unstable operation progressed (approximately three to five surge cycles later), surge cycles were present that contained a multiple-cell smaller-extent type rotating stall that existed throughout the entire surge cycle with no partial operation in the stable operating region. Thus, compressor system recovery from single-cell large-extent rotating stall (partial operation in stable operating range during the surge cycle) is more probable than recovery from multiple-cell small-extent rotating stall (no operation in stable operating range during the surge cycle). Rotor wheel speed was shown to be an important variable in influencing the form of unstable operation. Surge and rotating stall were shown to be coupled during the unstable operation. Furthermore, the surge/stall coupling was shown to be related more by pressure interactions than by temperature or efficiency interactions. Also, this high hub-tip ratio transonic rotor was shown to exhibit instantaneous stalling across the entire blade span (typical of low-speed, high hub-tip ratio machines). Attempts to fit the data to Greitzer’s one-dimensional lumped-parameter model are presented and the reasons for poor agreement are discussed. / Master of Science

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<p>Ground vehicles are subjected to crosswind from various origins such as weather, topography of the ambient environment (land, forest, tunnels, high bushes...) or surrounding traffic. The trend of lowering the weight of vehicles imposes a stronger need for understanding the coupling between crosswind stability, the vehicle external shape and the dynamic properties. Means for reducing fuel consumption of ground vehicles can also conflict with the handling and dynamic characteristics of the vehicle. Streamlined design of vehicle shapes to lower the drag can be a good example of this dilemma. If care is not taken, the streamlined shape can lead to an increase in yaw moment under crosswind conditions which results in a poor handling.</p><p>The development of numerical methods provides efficient tools to investigate these complex phenomena that are difficult to reproduce experimentally. Time accurate and scale resolving methods, like Detached-Eddy Simulations (DES), are particularly of interest, since they allow a better description of unsteady flows than standard Reynolds Average Navier-Stokes (RANS) models. Moreover, due to the constant increase in computational resources, this type of simulations complies more and more with industrial interests and design cycles.</p><p>In this thesis, the possibilities offered by DES to simulate unsteady crosswind aerodynamics of simple vehicle models in an industrial framework are explored. A large part of the work is devoted to the grid design, which is especially crucial for truthful results from DES. Additional concerns in simulations of unsteady crosswind aerodynamics are highlighted, especially for the resolution of the wind-gust boundary layer profiles. Finally, the transient behaviour of the aerodynamic loads and the flow structures are analyzed for several types of vehicles. The results simulated with DES are promising and the overall agreement with the experimental data available is good, which illustrates a certain reliability in the simulations. In addition, the simulations show that the force coefficients exhibit highly transient behaviour under gusty conditions.</p> / ECO2 Crosswind Stability and Unsteady Aerodynamics for Ground Vehicles