Preliminary Study of High Mach Arc Aerodynamic Test Wind Tunnel

The construction of a high Mach number aerodynamic test wind tunnel needs to solve two technical challenges: one is to solve the problem of anti-condensation heating of the test airflow, and to develop a high-temperature heater; Another is to solve the quality problem of wind tunnel flow field. For the first issue, when the Mach number is less than 10, conventional high Mach aerodynamic test wind tunnels generally use resistance heated heaters as much as possible to reduce the impact of combustion pulsation and combustion products on the test results. When the Mach number is greater than 10, the anti condensation temperature of the high Mach wind tunnel will reach 1200-3000 K, which conventional storage-type heaters cannot reach. The Russian T-117 high Mach aerodynamic wind tunnel, as a precedent, uses arc heaters. Arc heaters are currently mainly used for aerodynamic thermal effects research in high Mach flight aerodynamic thermal tests. The aerodynamic thermal tests focus on flow field parameters such as enthalpy and pressure, while the requirements for repeatability and uniformity are not as high as those for aerodynamic tests. If a conventional arc heater is directly used as a high Mach wind tunnel heater, it will not meet the requirements for aerodynamic test flow field quality. There are some problems in solving the quality of the flow field at the outlet of the arc heater nozzle: one is to reduce the pulsation of the arc operation and improve the stability of the temperature and pressure parameters in the flow field over time. The second is to weaken the rotation of the airflow and enhance the spatial uniformity of the flow field. The third is to figure out what the test medium is, which means to investigate the gas component and proportion. This article mainly discusses the problem of insufficient flow field quality when using arc heaters for aerodynamic tests, and proposes three research directions to solve the problem of flow field quality at the outlet of arc heater nozzles, providing reference for the research work of arc heaters used for high Mach aerodynamic tests.