Support interference and correction of cold-flow force test for air-breathing hypersonic vehicle in wind tunnel

The supporting mechanism greatly influences the aerodynamic force measurement of the air-breathing hypersonic flight vehicles in wind tunnel tests. In this paper, the supporting interference is studied by both wind tunnel experiments and CFD. First, an integrated vehicle is developed based on the wedge-elliptical cone waverider configuration method. Three types of supporting mechanisms are adopted to conduct the force measurement at Mach 4 and 6 in the hypersonic wind tunnel, with the rear sting mount, the back blade mount, and the back blade mount + dummy rear sting mount. And, a correction method is adopted here to account for the supporting interference. With this method, the interference increments due to the supporting mechanism can be eliminated from the results obtained from the rear sting mount. The result shows that all the supporting mechanisms have an influence on the aerodynamic force and the rear sting mount is more suitable to be used as the supporting mechanism with a less influence in contrast with the back blade and the back blade mount + dummy rear sting mount. In addition, it is recommended to use the correction method to improve the measurement accuracy of the experiment data.