Supersonic Wind Tunnel
The Missouri S&T Supersonic Wind Tunnel is a cold-flow blow-down facility located in the Aerodynamics Research Laboratory. The tunnel has a Mach 3 rectangular nozzle with a 127 x 127 mm exit area. The tunnel has a nominal total pressure of 1.52 MPa and a total temperature of 280 K. These values provide a Reynolds number per unit length of 135 million per meter. A LabView-based, scheduled-gain PID controller maintains the stagnation pressure within 3% of its nominal value. The total temperature in the plenum decreases by only 1% during a 20 second test run. The main reservoir of the facility has a volume of 7.493 cubic meter and can be pressurized to 13.8 MPa, providing run times of up to 1 minute at maximum stagnation conditions. The tunnel was designed with optical access in mind. All four sides of the modular test section can be used as windows. These ports facilitate a broad range of advanced non-intrusive diagnostics, including Tomographic Particle Image Velocimetry (Tomo-PIV), two-point focused laser differential interferometry (2-FLDI), and Schlieren/Shadowgraph techniques.
Equipment
Tomographic Particle Image Velocimetry
- LaVision turn-key TPIV system.
- 2440 x 2040 pixels, 123 frames/sec at full resolution, 2.7 x 2.7 micron pixels.
- Nd:YAG Dual Cavity pulsed laser, 2 x 200 mJ/pulse at 532 nm, 15 Hz pulse rate.
- DaVis 11 Software with TPIV add-on
- Titanium Dioxide seed particles, 20 nm nominal size.
Two-point Focused Laser Differential Interferometry
- Cobolt Samba 532nm, 1500mW CW laser
Schlieren/Shadowgraph System
A 5″ diameter schlieren/shadowgraph is available at the supersonic wind tunnel.
Intrusive Arm
1 degree of freedom arm for intrusive probes or model support. Current instrumentation:
- Pitot probe