Hypersonic Stationary Crossflow Waves: Receptivity to Roughness

Experiments were performed on a sharp-nosed 7° half-angle cone at a 6° angle of attack in the Boeing/AFOSR Mach-6 Quiet Tunnel (BAM6QT) to study the stationary crossflow instability and its receptivity to small surface roughness. Heat transfer measurements were obtained using temperature sensitive paint (TSP) and Schmidt Boelter (SB) heat transfer gauges. Great care was taken to obtain repeatable, quantitative measurements from TSP.

Consecutive runs were performed at a 0° angle of attack, and the heat transfer measured by the SB was found to drop as the initial model temperature increased, while other initial conditions such as stagnation pressure were held constant. This agreed with calculations done using a similarity solution. It was found that repeatable measurements at a 6° angle of attack could be made if the initial model temperature was controlled and the patch location that was used to calibrate the TSP was picked in a reasonable and consistent manner.

The Rod Insertion Method (RIM) roughness, which was used to excite the stationary crossflow instability, was found to be responsible for the appearance of the streaks that were analyzed. The signal-to-noise ratio in the TSP was too low to properly measure the streaks directly downstream of the roughness insert. The heat transfer along the streak experienced linear growth, peaked, and then slightly decayed. It is possible this peak was saturation. The general trend was that the growth of the streaks moved farther upstream as the roughness element height increased, which agreed with past computations and low speed experiments. The growth of the streak also moved farther upstream as the freestream Reynolds number increased. The amplitude of the streaks was calculated by non-dimensionalizing the heat transfer using the laminar theoretical mean-flow solution for a 7° half-angle cone at a 6° angle of attack. The relationship between the amplitude and the non-dimensional roughness height was approximately linear in the growth region of the streaks.