Experiments on High-Temperature Hypersonic Fluid–Structure Interaction with Plastic Deformation

This study provides experimental results on hypersonic fluid structure interaction (FSI) with focus on high thermal loads and plastic deformation designed for validation of coupled simulations. We conducted experiments with thin panels in a high enthalpy flow environment in the arc-heated wind tunnel L3K. Time-resolved surface deformation and temperature fields were measured. The challenging digital image correlation (DIC) measurements through the flow field were validated by comparison to internal laser triangulation measurements. The resulting data set allows a detailed analysis of the coupling between thermal loads and structural deformation. We obtained severe localized heating and resulting deformations of more than 12 times the panel thickness. In addition to single exposure measurements, the effects of repeated load cycles were investigated.