Report on Orion CEV Tunnel 9 Aeroheating

Experimental Investigation of Project Orion
Crew Exploration Vehicle Aeroheating in
AEDC Tunnel 9

Brian R. Hollis, et. al; (NASA Langley Research Center)

An investigation of the aeroheating environment of the Project Orion Crew Entry Vehicle has been performed in the Arnold Engineering Development Center Tunnel 9. The goals of this test were to measure turbulent heating augmentation levels on the heat shield and to obtain high-fidelity heating data for assessment of computational fluid dynamics methods. Laminar and turbulent predictions were generated for all wind tunnel test conditions and comparisons were performed with the data for the purpose of helping to define uncertainty margins for the computational method. Data from both the wind tunnel test and the computational study are presented herein.

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