Three-dimensional shock/boundary-layer interaction between a rocket and a booster

A shock-tunnel experiment was conducted to examine the characteristics of t hree-dimensional flowfield on the surface of a rocket in the vicinity of th e nose of a booster. In particular, attention was paid to the interaction o f a boundary layer on the rocket surface with a bow shock generated by the booster. Three shapes of booster nose were employed to change the strength of the bow shock, that is, to vary the magnitudes of heat flux and pressure on the rocket surface: hemisphere, cone, and hemisphere-cone. Results indi cate that in the case of the hemisphere booster nose the heat flux and pres sure have complicated distributions with locally lower values just upstream of the major peaks because of strong interaction. This suggests that a sep aration bubble occurs with a secondary separation inside it, which was conf irmed by oil-flaw visualization. This phenomenon was not discernable in the other two cases because of Weak interactions. In the comparison of heat fl ux and static pressure distributions, the heat flux was affected by the int eraction more widely in the circumferential direction than the pressure, wh ich tan be a three dimensional effect. Quantitatively, more accurate data w ere acquired by using thin-film resistance thermometers than previously pub lished data, which were measured by thin-skin thermocouples. From these dat a, a new correlation between heat flux and pressure with regard to their pe ak values was obtained, where the upstream flow is laminar and interaction region is turbulent.