Determination of heat losses and their influence on the performance characteristics of high-enthalpy hot-shot tubes

An analysis of the losses of heat into the walls of settling chamber in a hypersonic hot-shot tube has been performed. Tests without diaphragm rupture showed that the fall of settling-chamber pressure during the operating flow regime in the tube was the consequence of the transfer of heat from working body to wall; this has allowed us to evaluate the heat-transfer coefficient α and the inner-surface temperature of the wall T _w. An empirical formula relating the coefficient α with the pressure and working-body temperature in the settling chamber in the range of pressures and temperatures 160 to 540 bar and 700 to 3400 K was obtained. Using the gained dependences of α and T _w on pressure and temperature, we have developed a physical model for calculating the working-body characteristics in the tube with allowance for enthalpy losses. We found that by the hundredth millisecond of the operating regime the disregard, in such calculations, of the wall heat flux in the first settling chamber resulted in overestimation of the stagnation temperature in the test section in comparison with similar calculations made without allowance for the heat losses by 6–18 % in terms of the full-scale temperature for aircraft flight in Mach number range 5 to 8. The developed calculation procedure has been tested in experiments without diaphragm rupture.