Computational and Experimental Study of Nonequilibrium Flow in Plasma Wind Tunnel

What is it about?

Arc heated wind tunnels or Plasma Wind Tunnels are ground based test facilities for replication of high temperature flows encountered by a space capsule while entering earth atmosphere. However, the flow field in arc heated wind tunnel is in thermo-chemical non-equilibrium, which necessitates computational and experimental tools to understand the nature of flow. In this work we use the open source code hy2Foam for carrying out the computational part. We compare the computed flow temperatures with those measured using Optical Emission Spectroscopy.

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