Global Heat-Transfer Measurements on the NASA Crew Exploration Vehicle at AEDC Tunnel 9

A quantitative global intensity-based temperature-sensitive paint heat-transfer measurement system has been developed for use in AEDC Hypervelocity Wind Tunnel No. 9. A numerical data reduction approach has been proposed for calculating the convective heat flux from the temperature-sensitive paint emission intensity data. As a part of the development effort, temperature-sensitive paint emission intensity data have been collected on a model of a NASA Crew Exploration Vehicle capsule in Mach 10 flow. The proposed data reduction algorithm has been applied to generate high-resolution quantitative heat- transfer maps of the model's heat shield. On the majority of the heat shield surface, a good agreement between the heat-transfer maps and the baseline conventional instrumentation data has been revealed.