Investigation of the Accuracy of Simulating Convective Heat Transfer in Subsonic Jets of Dissociated Air in a RF Plasmatron

Abstract

Numerical estimates are performed on the correspondence of heat fluxes at stagnation points when subsonic high-enthalpy air jets flow around a model in a RF plasmatron and when blunt bodies enter Earth’s atmosphere at supersonic speed, when the parameters of these qualitatively different flows are related by local simulation conditions. For cold walls, the similarity of the normalized heat fluxes in the entire range of the effective catalytic-recombination coefficient of atoms is confirmed when the simulation conditions are met. By calculations for the conditions of experiments using a RF plasmatron and for the corresponding parameters of entrance into Earth’s atmosphere, it is found that the radiation-equilibrium wall temperature is simulated with good accuracy in subsonic high-enthalpy air jets for highly catalytic surfaces and with satisfactory accuracy for low-catalytic ones.