Operator's Guide for the Combustion Driven Shock Tunnel in the TS Laboratory at GALCIT

Abstract

The combustion driven shock tunnel was designed and built at GALCIT to supply the hypersonic facility T5 with "hot" hydrogen for hypervelocity mixing and combustion experiments. This "hot" fuel is needed to reproduce the environment encountered by a scramjet engine in real flight where the fuel is used first to cool down the skin of the airplane before being injected into the engine. The combustion driven shock tunnel was chosen over other options for better flexibility and for safety reasons. This operator's guide is only intended for future users of the combustion driven shock tunnel and will not cover material already presented in the GALCIT thesis "Studies of Mixing and Combustion in Hypervelocity Flows with Hot Hydrogen Injection" by Jacques Bélanger. It is mandatory to carefully study chapter 3 of that thesis before getting into the details of the system operation presented here. The manual is divided into two parts, the first part describes the different components and how they are assembled, the second part describes the firing procedure itself. A major effort is made in this guide to incorporate the hands-on experience learned over the years with the system. Hopefully, these "hints" will save time and trouble to future users.