The precise experimental determination of the heat loads acting on vehicles traveling at hypersonic speeds is crucial for the design of the vehicle’s thermal protection system. Computational fluid dynamics
methods provide increasingly powerful possibilities for the simulation of such hypersonic configurations. Nevertheless, the difficulties s in the accurate modelling of high-temperature effects in chemically reacting
flows, boundary-layer transition and shock-wave/boundary-layer interactions, mean that ground-based testing will remain an important tool for evaluating the heating levels encountered by high-speed vehicles for the foreseeable future. The High Enthalpy Shock Tunnel Gottingen (HEG) of the German Aerospace Center (DLR), capable of performing such
testing, is one of the major European hypersonic test facilities. It was commissioned for use in 1991 and has been utilized since then extensively in a large number of national and international space and hypersonic flight
projects.