Development and Experimental Verification of Manual Piston Driven Hypersonic Shock Tunnel

Abstract

A shock tunnel is a relatively low-duration wind tunnel made of a dump tank, test chamber, supersonic nozzle, and a shock tube. Ground-based hypersonic facilities are one of the most important setups for testing hypersonic flows. The study of hypersonic flows has expanded in many educational institute, but due to the high cost of experimental facilities, many institutions depend on theories and small scale CFD simulations to visualize hypersonic flows. Reddy Tunnel, which is one of the major inspirations of this paper, is a miniaturized hypersonic tunnel. Hence, this is an attempt to design, fabricate, and test an economic M6-free piston shock tunnel. The analytical calculations were done for the shock tube, nozzle and capacity of dump tank. The flow was considered isentropic and the simulations were done in OpenFoam v2112. The simulations showed the desired results in shock tube. The nozzle was axisymmetric and contoured. It was designed using method of characteristic in Matlab. The simulations of nozzle showed that it generated hypersonic speed of Mach number 5.2. The shock tube of 32 mm diameter was divided into two parts, where the length of the driver section was 510mm and the driven section was 490mm. The driven section was connected to a contoured supersonic nozzle of 295 mm length