Transient Temperature Data Analysis for a Supersonic Flight Test

Determination of transient surface heat flux from the temperature data is one of the traditional techniques applied in many engineering applications. With respect to high speed flight experiments, the time scale of measured temperature data is usually very small (∼ms). So, one-dimensional heat conduction analysis is expensively used to infer surface heating rates on the body. For an analytical modeling, it is necessary to obtain a closed form solution from experimentally measured temperature data. In this paper, a temperature data obtained from a nickel film sensor during a supersonic flight test is considered for analysis. Three different curve fitting techniques are used to recover the temperature history of real time flight, namely, piecewise linear fit, polynomial fitting, and cubic-spline method. A one-dimensional transient heat transfer modeling is used to infer surface heating rates from the closed form temperature solutions. Results obtained from these analysis are compared and it is seen that peak surface heat flux values match very closely for polynomial and cubic-spline fitting of temperature data. But, the piecewise linear fit of temperature data underpredicts the peak surface heat flux value by four times from its counterparts.