High-enthalpy test environments, flow modeling and in situ diagnostics for characterizing ultra-high temperature ceramics

摘要

Ultra-high temperature ceramic materials and composites under development as nose-tip and wing leading edge components for hypersonic flightN ehicles must operate in extreme aerothermal heating environments. The performance of ultra-high temperature ceramics for this application isultimately evaluated using high-enthalpy, long duration flow facilities that simulate the reactive gas environment encountered in hypersonic flight.In this paper, we describe the test environments generated by two types of these ground test facilities - subsonic inductively coupled plasmatunnels and supersonic arc-jet tunnels - and discuss the important roles of computational fluid dynamics modeling and in situ optical diagnostics for interpreting test results from a materials science perspective.