Surface Pressure Measurements on a Forebody Using Pressure Sensitive Paint

Abstract

Pressure sensitive paint (PSP) gives the full-field pressure pattern on the model surface with a high spatial resolution and is an alternative to traditional pressure taps used in a wind tunnel model. This study determines surface pressure patterns on the forebody of an AGARD B model in a compressible flow and the data is in comparison with a numerical simulation using ANSYS Fluent software. The lift and drag coefficients are calculated and compared with data in literature. The experiments use a blowdown wind tunnel. The freestream Mach number is 0.83 and the angle of attack ranges from -4° to 8°. The difference between the results using PSP and the numerical simulation is less than 5%.