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Experiments on Aerothermal and Incident-Shock Effects on Fluid-Structure Interaction in Hypersonic Flow

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: Fluid-Thermal-Structure Interaction (FTSI) is a challenging but crucial problem in the design of high-speed aviation and space transportation vehicles. Despite decades of research, modeling capabilities are still limited, especially when detailed knowledge of aerothermal heat transfer or the dynamics of separated flow is required for a reliable prediction of structural loads. Building on previous studies, these aspects were explored further in the present experiments in the hypersonic wind tunnel H2K at DLR, Cologne. The range of observed conditions was extended by variations in total temperature to study the effects of thermal buckling and by variations of the incident shock location to study the effects of the shock-wave/boundary-layer interaction (SWBLI) flow field. Furthermore, variations of the pressure in the cavity underneath the panel were conducted as that is an important boundary condition for the coupled dynamic behavior that previously had not been explored for this setup. For all these variations, panel oscillations of several times the panel thickness were observed, clearly showing the effects of the respective changes in the flow field or cavity pressure. In addition to these variations, important improvements in instrumentation were made by adding a high-speed digital image correlation (DIC) system enabling the time-resolved full-field recording of the panel surface displacement. The wind tunnel experiments were accompanied by the reference characterization of the properties of the elastic structures outside the wind tunnel. This study adds to a growing but still limited experimental data base on hypersonic FTSI to both improve the fundamental understanding of such problems and to serve as reference for modeling efforts.

Source: Journal of Sound and Vibration

DOI: 10.1016/j.jsv.2026.120159