Enthalpy Characterization and Assessment of Copper Catalysis Determination in Inductively Coupled Plasma Facility

摘要

Spacecrafts re-entering the atmosphere at hypersonic regimes consider the wall catalytic activity on their design phase. Therefore, accurate catalytic models are required to maximize mission efficiency. In order to develope and validate an experimental approach for a catalytic model in the VKI-Plasmatron facility, a good enthalpy characterization of the freest ream plasma flow is required. A method to rebuild the boundary layer outer edge properties based on calorimctric measurements is described and consolidated in this paper. The technique requires the prior determination of the wall catalytic conditions on a reference material (γ_(ref)), so a method called Mini-Max is applied under different facility conditions and a reference catalysis on Cu of γ_(ref) = 0.0265 ± 26.42% at 50mbar and γ_(ref) = 0.0156 ±40.81% at 100mbar is obtained. Additional tests in different probe geometries suggest that the boundary layer characteristics affect the determination of the recombination coefficient, which is important for the future development of flight extrapolation techniques of wall boundary conditions.