Aerothermal Coupling Methodology for the Rebuilding of a Plasma Wind Tunnel Test and Comparison with an Advanced Infrared Measurement Technique

The research program CAST (Innovative erothermodynamic Configuration for Space Transportation System), founded by the Italian Space Agency, is currently on-going with the aim at improving the state of art of national simulation capabilities both in terms of basic phenomena modelling and numerical tools. CIRA (Italian Aerospace Research Centre) as prime and several Research and Academic institutions all over Italy are involved in this program. In the frame of this program, different experimental tests, covering a wide range of typical hypersonic flow phenomena, have been carried out with the aim to gather data to be used for code validation. In order to maximize the synergy between different national programs, also a Plasma Wind Tunnel test carried out within the Advanced Structural Assembly technological project on a Wing Leading Edge Thermal Protection System demonstrator has been used for the CAST purposes. In the present work, the results of the aerothermal rebuilding of this test will be presented: an integrated procedure to couple the external aerodynamic field to the internal thermal state of the structure has been adopted and the results have been compared with the experimental data provided by an Advanced Infrared Thermo-camera Techniqu