Preliminary design and simulation of reflected shock tunnel in Taiwan

This work aims to report the preliminary design of a reflected shock tunnel which will be built and tested at National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan, in year 2009. Notably, this tunnel will be the first ground test facility for hypersonic flow in Taiwan. The design objective of reflected shock tunnel is to produce two free-stream conditions for a preliminary study of scramjet: (1) Mach 2 flow with temperature up to 1300 K and pressure up to 0.5 atm for the design conditions of supersonic combustion and (2) Mach 5 flow for the design condition of external flow. This shock tunnel is composed by a 13-meter-long shock tube, of which the diameter is 18 cm. The length of driver section is 3 m and the driven section is 10 m. The preliminary design is based on the numerical simulation results by using three different codes, CEA, UNIC-UNS, and a compressible multiphase flow solver. In this work, the compressible multiphase flow solver is used to investigate the near-tailored condition and stagnation properties under different initial conditions in helium-air shock tube. The numerical simulations of nozzle flow are implemented by UNIC-UNS. According to our simulation results, the present design is capable of meeting the required operation conditions. Besides, the schematic diagram of reflected shock tunnel is presented in this paper.