Air, Helium and CO2 Transverse Sonic Jets in Mach 5 Cross Flow

ERINC ERDEM
Final year PhD student, School of MACE, The University of Manchester

Introduction
In high speed flight traditional aerodynamic control surfaces are subjected to severe flight conditions and
loadings in different flight corridors. At high altitudes, these surfaces might not function properly due to low
density air and/or significant aerodynamic heating resulting from various flow interaction phenomena.
Transverse jet injection serves a strong alternative control method to overcome these problems and entirely
regulated by the fluid injection, which eliminates the need for actuators to deflect mechanical parts. However a
major drawback of this method is the complex three dimensional unsteady flowfield consisting of separated
regions, shock waves, shear layers and wakes, etc. In order to resolve this complex flow topology there is a
strong need for two/three dimensional measurement techniques such as Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) that
measures velocity vector field on a plane. Yet the application of PIV to high speed flows is not trivial; the need
for uniform seeding of solid nanoparticles, and the use of quick interframe time cameras, high power lasers
are mandatory for high quality experimental data. Current study aims at the investigation of the unsteady flow
topology resulting from a transverse sonic jet in Mach 5 cross flow over a flat surface using PIV and also
2
2
assesses the effect of injectant gas at a very similar momentum flux ratio, J, (=jetpjetM jet/ pM ).

Facility and PIV Setup

All of the experiments are conducted in the High SuperSonic Tunnel (HSST) of the University of Manchester.
The tunnel is of the intermediate blowdown (pressure-vacuum) type which uses dry air as working fluid. The
details of the test section together with standard instrumentation for stagnation pressure and temperature
mesurements as well as high speed schlieren photography setup is shown in Fig. 1 (left). In the experiments
Air, Helium and CO2 jets are injected though an orifice of 2mm located on the centre of the flat plate. These
jets are seeded with aliminium oxide powder particles with a nominal crystal size of 300 nm using Ps-10
powder seeder device. Transverse jet is regulated by a pressure transducer on the line just before the jet
orifice. A Litron Nd:Yag Q-switched laser with an energy level of 200 mJ per 4nsec long pulse at a repetition
rate of 15 Hz is used for illumination. The pulse separation time (t) can be adjusted up to 0.1 ses as
minimum. A laser sheet of 0.5mm thickness is produced and routed above the test section via laser guide arm
that is tilted at 45 degrees with respect to the centerline of the flat plate as shown below in Fig. 1 (right). 100
pairs of images during a test run are recorded with t of 0.6 sec for air and CO2 jets and 0.3 sec for Helium
jet so that sufficient displacement for the tracer particles of between 4.5 to 10 pixels for the velocity range from
300 m/s to 700 m/s can be achieved. A LaVision Imager ProX2M CCD camera with 2MPixel resolution views
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the streamwise laser sheet orthogonally at a field of view of 64x48 mm . The recorded images are processed
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with a cross correlation algorithm of DaVis 7.2. First the images are divided into 32x32 pixel initial
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interrogation windows and then refined to 16x16 pixel with 50% overlap to produce 200x150 vectors. With this
arrangement, two adjacent velocity vectors are separated by approximately 0.2 mm.

Figure 1 Test section schematic (left) and PIV setup (right)

Results
The incoming freestream flow is at Mach 5 with a freestream velocity, pressure and temperature of 790m/s,
1220Pa and 62.5K respectively. Incoming Reynolds number per unit length is 13.2x106 1/m. The jet is
regulated to give a jet to freestream momentum flux ratio, J, of around 2.7 for all gases.

Figure 2 Three instantaneous raw PIV images with 3 gases (top: Air, middle: C02 and bottom: Helium)

Fig.2
2 above shows instantaneous raw PIV images at mach 5 cross flow signifying the difference in penetration
characteristics. From extensive research J is found to be the only gove
governing
rning parameter for jet penetration that
includes specific heat ratio, , of the gas. However the penetration trajectory and jet to freestream mixing are
clearly affected by type of the gas in both nearfield and farfield. In the nearfield air and CO2 (despite being
heavier than air) jets behaves
ehaves similar in terms of first expansion of the jet, however
how
Helium expands little,
carries on vertical for about 3 jet diameter and then ben
bends towards the main stream. In terms of farfield Helium
mixes minimal compared to others.
others CO2 jet propagates closer to wall than air jet due to its heaviness.
heaviness
Following Fig.3 shows velocity magnitude contours of the average of 100 instantaneous uncorrelated vector
fields with 3 gases captured during 7.5 seconds of the useful running time of HSST. Jet is situtated between 2
and 3 in x direction and y=0 specifies the wall. Air jet shows medium
dium penetration path and expands
substantially in farfield with blurred upper and lower bounds, whereas Co2 jet has quite distinct jet boundaries
and convects closer to wall. On the other hand Helium jet bends smoothly and convects far from the wall. All
the jets reach around 700m/s downstream where they are carried by the main flow behind the jet induced bow
shock wave.

Figure 3 Averaged vector fields over 100 instantaneous samples with 3 gases (left:: Air, middle: C02 and right: Helium)

The Fig.4 below shows the turbulence intensity contours

contour deducted from 100 instantaneous vector fields with 3
gases. The Mach disc (normal
normal shock due to suddenly expanded jet) is clearly apparent with low turbulence
around jet vicinity and its shape is different with for these gases. For Helium jet the turbulence level is quite
high at the jet orifice due to higher jet velocity and also at the downstream region towards the wall. However in
the farfield intensity levels are somewhat smaller and patchy compared to other jets
ets.

Figure 4 Turbulence intensity with 3 gases (left: Air, middle: C02 and right:: Helium
Helium)

As a conclusion, air CO2 and Helium jets in high speed cross flow have quite different characteristics in terms
of penetration path, turbulence levels and mixing even though they have the same momentum flux ratio, a
parameter governing jet penetration. Especially Helium has a very distinct behavior at near field mixing. PIV
investigation of these types of flows
flow is carried out first time in literature.