Heat-Transfer Measurements in Free Flight at Mach Numbers up to 14.6 on a Flat-Faced Conical Nose with a Total Angle of 29 Degrees

Skin-temperature measurements have been made at several locations on a flat-faced cone-cylinder nose which was flight tested on a fivestage rocket-propeller model to a Mach number of 14.64 and a free-stream Reynolds number of 2.0 x 10(exp 6), based on flat-face diameter, at an altitude of 66,300 feet. The copper nose had a 29 deg total-angle conical section which was 1.6 flat-face diameters long. The aerodynamic-heating rates determined from the temperature measurements reached 1,440 Btu/( sec) (sq ft) on the flat face. The heating rates near the center of the flat face agreed well at Mach numbers up to 13.6 with those obtained by a theory for laminar stagnation-point heating in equilibrium dissociated air (Avco Res. Rep. 1). At Mach numbers above 13.6, the heating rates at locations near the center of the flat face became progressively lower than stagnation-point theory and. were 29 percent lower at Mach number 14.6 at the end. of the test. The reason for this behavior of the heating on the central part of the flat face was not determined. Excluding the relatively low heating rates that occurred on the central part of the nose at the highest Mach numbers, the distribution of experimental heating along the innermost 0.79 of the flat-face radius, expressed as a percentage of stagnation-point heating, was in fair agreement with the distribution predicted by laminar theory. At a location of 0.71 radii from the stagnation point, the experimental heating was very near 130 percent of the theoretical stagnation-point rate at Mach numbers from 11 to 14.5. The experimental beating rates on the conical section of the nose were in good agreement with laminar-cone theory using the assumption of theoretical sharp-cone static pressure on the conical section.