High Altitude Hypersonic Flowfield Radiation

Abstract

Methods for computing radiation spectra and intensity are compared with available experimental data from three flight tests and five laboratory experiments. These involve both nonequilibrium and equilibrium flow. The comparison was facilitated by development of an improved radiation code, termed NEQAIR 2, incorporating vectorized programming to enable fine-structure spectra to be computed in a practical amount of time. The main sources of computational inaccuracy are found to stem from imperfect understanding of. (1) what temperature or combination thereof in a multi-temperature flowfield governs electronic excitation; (2) the physics of rotational relaxation at very high temperatures; and (3) the reaction rates for NO production at very high temperatures. Computed radiation is most accurate at low altitudes and hypersonic velocities, and least accurate at high altitudes and velocities. Flowfield radiation, Hypersonic, Nonequilibrium, Spectra.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Apr 01, 1994
Accession Number
ADA281386

Entities

People

  • Dean R. Chapman
  • Robert W. Maccormack

Organizations

  • Stanford University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Aeronautics
  • Altitude
  • Astronautics
  • Boundary Layer
  • Computational Science
  • Computations
  • Contracts
  • Experimental Data
  • Flow
  • Flow Fields
  • Fluid Mechanics
  • High Altitude
  • High Temperature
  • Layers
  • Military Research
  • Reynolds Number
  • Shock Tubes

Fields of Study

  • Physics

Readers

  • Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)
  • Molecular Photonics/Laser Physics
  • Spectroscopy.

Technology Areas

  • Hypersonics
  • Hypersonics - Hypersonic Flight
  • Hypersonics - Hypersonic Flow
  • Microelectronics