Tiejin Wang
DOI Number XXX-YYY-ZZZ
Conference Number HiSST 2018_22901047
The conventional hypersonic wind tunnel plays an important role in the design of hypersonic vehicles, where the pressure pure air is used as working medium, and heated through convection heaters. With the development of hypersonic vehicles, especially the vehicle with SCRAM jet as propulsion system, the large-scale conventional hypersonic wind tunnel with nozzle exit diameter of 2m order of magnitude is required, and its test capability will be extended from the conventional aerodynamic force and aero-heating tests to the thermal protection and Scramjet tests with high total temperature, for example, in the Scramjet tests to simulate the flow conditions of Mach number of 6, the total temperature may be about 2000K. The critical issue encountered in the design of this kind of largescale conventional hypersonic wind tunnel is that the energy consumption, as well as the pollution of noise and waste heat of the exhausting working air, also increases dramatically in the tunnel operation with high temperature. How to save energy and decrease environmental pollution while the simulation conditions for the development of hypersonic vehicles are satisfied has become an important problem to be considered in the design of the conventional hypersonic wind tunnel. To solve the problem, the aerodynamic layout of the conventional hypersonic wind tunnel is optimized in this paper as follows: first, the aerodynamic layouts of the existing conventional hypersonic wind tunnels are summarized; second, the energy transformation in the conventional hypersonic wind tunnel during its operation is theoretically analyzed, and on the view of point of saving energy and protecting environment are also analyzed the methods used to deal with the exhausting working air in different aerodynamic layouts; third, the possible methods for utilizing the remainder energy of exhausting working air are discussed; finally, an optimized aerodynamic layout for the large-scale conventional hypersonic wind tunnel is put forward, and critical technologies to be used in the realization of the layout are discussed. The result of a simple calculation of saved energy in the optimized aerodynamic layout at typical run condition shows its advantages in saving energy and protecting environment.