Unsteady Pressure-Sensitive Paint Application on NASA’s Space Launch System at NASA Ames Research Center’s Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel
Experimental results show unsteady Pressure-Sensitive Paint (uPSP) was used to measure time-resolved surface pressure distribution over the full surface of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) cargo configuration producing results at a level of detail that have never been measured or seen before at this resolution.
NASA
Test objectives were to acquire dynamic pressure environment to assist in verification of aeroacoustic environment and development of buffet forcing function. Pressure-Sensitive Paint was used to measure time-resolved surface pressure distribution over the full surface of the vehicle producing results at a level of detail that have never been measured or seen at this resolution before.
A model of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) cargo variant, designated for the Europa mission called Science Mission 1 (SM1) was tested in the 11×11-foot Transonic Test Section of the Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel at NASA’s Ames Research Center. Unsteady Pressure-Sensitive Paint (uPSP) was used to measure global unsteady pressure distributions on the model at 10,000 frames per second.
NASA Ames / Dominic Hart
Engineers discuss the preliminary data transferred from the 11×11-foot Transonic Test Section of the Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel for processing at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility and visualized at the NAS Hyperwall facility in near real-time.
NASA Ames / Dominic Ha