Plume Visualization of Orion Launch Abort Vehicle Jettison Motors Using Background-Oriented Schlieren

Abstract

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 NASA Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV). 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 small optical accesses 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.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2010
Accession Number
ADA513096

Entities

People

  • Carrie K. Reinholtz
  • Fred L. Heltsley
  • Kenneth E. Scott

Organizations

  • Arnold Engineering Development Complex

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Space
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Acquisition
  • Air Force
  • Boundary Layer
  • Cameras
  • Computational Fluid Dynamics
  • Data Acquisition
  • Data Sets
  • Engineering
  • Fluid Dynamics
  • Fluid Flow
  • Geometry
  • Governments
  • High Pressure
  • Mach Number
  • Refractive Index
  • Test Facilities
  • Wind Tunnels

Fields of Study

  • Physics

Readers

  • Fluid Dynamics.
  • Image Processing and Computer Vision.