Hypersonic Shock Impingement on a Heated Surface in the T4 Free-Piston Driven Shock Tunnel

Shock impingement is one of the fundamental shock/boundary layer interaction cases in hypersonic flight vehicles. The adverse pressure gradient due to an oblique shock significantly increases the pressure and thermal loads on the vehicle surface. In addition to the shock impingement, the effect of the heated surface temperature in realistic hypersonic flows has not been extensively investigated. This paper presents a numerical approach to investigate hypersonic shock impingement on heated walls. The numerical results showed that the extent of flow separation was increased by the elevated wall temperature. Following this numerical work, a flat-plate/shock generator model that has been designed will be experimentally tested at The University of Queenland’s T4 free-piston driven shock tunnel to compare the flow-field and the incipient separation predicted from twodimensional numerical simulations.