22nd Congress of International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences, Harrogate, UK, 28 August - 1st September, 2000
Paper ICAS 2000-3.3.3

PRESSURE SENSITIVE PAINT APPLICATION AT LARGE PRODUCTION WIND TUNNELS

Y. Shimbo (1), K. Asai (1), N. Komatsu (2)
(1) National Aerospace Laboratory, Japan; (2) Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd., Japan

Keywords: pressure sensitive paint, wind tunnel, pressure measurement

A pressure sensitive paint (PSP) technique was established based on a commercially available paint and a CCD camera-based measurement system. To convert the paint data into pressure, a new PSP/TSP combined calibration was applied other than the conventional in situ calibration. The new method required no pressure tap to the model, and used a temperature sensitive paint (TSP) to compensate for the unfavorable temperature sensitivity of the PSP. It was first applied in the continuous 2m transonic wind tunnel testing where both pressure and temperature conditions on the model were steady, and the test results of a rigid-body axisymmetric model and a deformative wing-body model showed very good agreement with the pressure tap data. Then, the paint technique was expanded to the blowdown 1m supersonic wind tunnel testing where the model surface temperature changed with respect to time. The test results of a thin-wing SST model also showed good agreement with the pressure tap measurement even there was about 10K drop in the model surface temperature during 40 seconds blow at M=2. In addition, the paint data successfully provided valuable pressure field visualization through the work, which was not usually achieved by the conventional point measurement by the pressure taps.

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