EXPERIMENTAL RAREFIED DENSITY FLOWFIELDS AT HYPERSONIC CONDITIONS OVER 70-DEGREE BLUNTED CONE

At rarefied flow regimes, flowfield investigations have been conducted in the SR3 wind tunnel on a 70-deg spherically blunted cone and densi ty flowfields obtained by nonintrusive electron beam fluorescence meas urements. The blunted cone, chosen as the test case model, has been th e subject of extensive studies during the past few years. In addition to some limited results already presented at the Fourth European High- Velocity Database Workshop, the present research gathers density flowf ields obtained experimentally at two rarefied hypersonic flow conditio ns. Experiments have been performed at a freestream Mach number close to 20 and for two Reynolds numbers, 1420 and 4175, calculated using fr eestream conditions and the cone base diameter. Density flowfields are presented for the two angles of attack, 0 and 10 deg, of the cone, In parallel to the experimental work presented, a number of flowfield ca lculations were executed by an international group of researchers for test conditions identical to SR3 test conditions. Flowfields were calc ulated using direct simulation Monte Carlo solutions, leading to compa risons between experimental and computational flowfields.