Visualization of Jettison Motor Plumes from an Orion Launch Abort Vehicle Wind Tunnel Model Using Background-Oriented Schlieren

摘要

A Background-Oriented Schlieren (BOS) system has recently been implemented in the Aerodynamic Wind Tunnel 16T at Arnold Engineering Development Center (AEDC) to qualitatively visualize the Jettison Motor plumes on the Orion Launch Abort Vehicle (LAV). As applied to aerodynamics, BOS is an optical technique that exploits gradients in the refractive index of fluid volumes like schlieren, shadowgraph, and interferometry techniques to visualize flow structures and density gradients. BOS requires only minimal optical access to view a painted dot pattern through a refracting media to visualize density gradients in the fluid. This is of particular interest in wind tunnels or other testing facilities where optical access is limited and/or other common visualization techniques are not readily available. Images were acquired for multiple Mach number flows, plenum pressures and model attitudes to visualize the jet plume and model shock interactions for two Jettison Motor geometries.