Shock Tunnel Operation and Correlation of Boundary Layer Transition on a Cone in Hypervelocity Flow

The Caltech T5 reflected shock tunnel is used to produce hypervelocity flow over a range of velocities and pressures by varying the test gas and operating parameters of reservoir enthalpy (hres) and reservoir pressure (Pres). One area of research in T5 is the measurement of boundary layer behavior and transition from laminar to turbulent flow on a smooth 5-degree half-angle cone [3, 1, 11]