Experiments were performed with two different helium injector models at different injector
transverse and yaw angles in order to determine the mixing rate and core penetration of the injectant and
the flow field total pressure losses. when gaseous injection occurs into a supersonic freestream. Tested in
the Virginia Tech supersonic tunnel. with a freestream Mach number of 3.0 and conditions corresponding
to a freestream Reynolds number of 5.0 x 107 1m. was a single. sonic. 5X underexpanded, helium jet at a
downstream angle of 30° relative to the freestream. This injector was rotated from 0° to _28° to test the
effects of injector yaw. The second model was an array of three supersonic, 5X underexpanded helium
injectors with an exit Mach number of 1.7 and a transverse angle of 15°. This model was tested in the
NASA Langley Mach 6.0, High Reynolds number tunnel, with freestream conditions corresponding to a
Reynolds number of 5.4 x 107 1m. The injector array as tested at yaw angles of 0° and -15°. Surface flow
visualization showed that significant flow asymmetries were produced by injector yaw. Nanosecond
exposure shadowgraph pictures were taken, showing the gaseous injection plume to be unsteady, and further
studies demonstrated this unsteadiness was related to shock waves orthogonal to the injectant bow shock,
that were generated at a frequency of 30 kHz. The primary data technique used, was a concentration probe
which measured the molar concentration of helium in the flow field. Concentration data and other
meanflow data was taken at several downstream axial stations and yielded contours of helium concentration,
total pressure, Mach number, velocity, and mass flux, as well as the static properties. From these contour
plots, the various mixing rates for each case were determined. The injectant mixing rates, expressed as the
maximum concentration decay, and mixing distances were found to be unaffected by injector yaw, in the
Mach 3.0 experiments, but were adversely affected by injector yaw in the Mach 6.0 experiments. One
promising aspect of injector yaw was the that as the yaw angle was increased, lateral motion of the injectant
plume became significant, and the turbulent mixing region area increased by approximately 34%.
Comparisons of the 15° transverse angled injection into a Mach 6.0 flow to previous experiments with 15°
injection into a Mach 3.0 freestream, demonstrated that there is a significant decrease in initial mixing, at
Mach 6.0, resulting in a much longer mixing distance. From a parametric computational study of the Mach
6.0 experiments, the effects of adjacent injectors was found to decrease lateral spreading while increasing
the vertical penetration of the injectant plume, and marginally increasing the injectant core decay rate.
Matching of the computational results to the experimental results was best achieved when using the
Baldwin-Lomax turbulence model without the Degani-Schiff modification.
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