Maxime LECHEVALLIER, Alexandra DUARTE ANTONIO, Pierre JACOB, Antoine BEAUVILLIER, Antoine COILLOT, Etienne CHOQUET, Quentin LAINE, Rolland QUILLEVERE, Bruno LE NAOUR
DOI Number: N/A
Conference number: HiSST-2025-319
For the past three decades, MBDA France has developed and commissioned hypersonic blow down wind tunnels to carry on scramjet development. In order to increase its range of use, MBDA France has updated the test line 5, by adding cold air to the flow coming from the vitiator, and mixing them in a mixing chamber. This additional air supply can be shut down, depending on the flight conditions to simulate. With these device, the wind tunnel can still reach high temperature (up to 2100K) at limited air mass flow rate, or target higher air mass flow rate (up to 150kg/s) at an intermediate temperature. This major modification, added to the needs for the associated mock-ups and nozzles, required additional improvements in gas or fuel supplies. In details, the modifications were aimed at increasing its field of application by simulating larger flight conditions toward lower Mach numbers and altitudes. In order to match those conditions, gaseous air and fuel supplies were added to the existing facility, and the wind tunnel previously developed for High Mach number flight simulation was modified to fit lower Mach numbers conditions. The hypersonic axisymmetric nozzle was adapted to fit the appropriate area ratio considering available mass flow rate resulting in a 1100mm diameter test section. Taking advantage of the short length of this new nozzle (4.5 meters) compared to the High Mach one, a mixing section about 4 meter long was inserted between this section and the vitiator. This device is able to provide an air mass flow rate up to 80 kg/s to dilute the hot flow provided by the H2/O2/Air vitiator that can reach a maximum total temperature of about 2100K and a maximum mass flow rate of about 70 kg/s. The mixing section is designed following the same concept as the vitiator. In particular, its uses a regenerative cooling enabling to reach long test durations and limiting heat losses which makes it more common to evaluate flow conditions and reduces vitiation rate. High temperature suitable screens was studied for turbulence management but are not used so far. Several runs, including flow characterization, shows satisfying working of the new facility. Those modifications have shown excellent performances during the tests. Beyond the increase of range of use, the wind tunnel n°5 is now more versatile with this device, and more suitable to increase the tests rate with various configurations. They demonstrated the capability of the facility to simulate a large range of flight conditions that are necessary for Scramjet Development.