Heat flux instrumentation for HYFLITE thermal protection system

Tasks performed in this project were defined in a September 9, 1994 meeting of representatives of Vatell, NASA Lewis and Virginia Tech. The overall objective agreed upon in the meeting was 'to demonstrate the viability of thin film techniques for heat flux and temperature sensing in HYSTEP thermal protection systems'. We decided to attempt a combination of NASA's and Vatell's best heat flux sensor technology in a sensor which would be tested in the Vortek facility at Lewis early in 1995. The NASA concept for thermocouple measurement of surface temperature was adopted, and Vatell methods for fabrication of sensors on small diameter substrates of aluminum nitride were used to produce a sensor. This sensor was then encapsulated in a NARloy-Z housing. Various improvements to the Vatell substrate design were explored without success. The basic NASA and Vatell sensor layouts were analyzed by finite element modeling, in an attempt to better understand the effects of material properties, dimensions and thermal differential element location on sensor symmetry, bandwidth and sensitivity. This analysis showed that, as long as the thermal resistivity of the thermal differential element material is much larger (10X) than that of the substrate material, the simplest arrangement of layer is best. During calibration of the sensor produced in this project, undesirable side-effects of combining the heat flux and temperature sensor return leads were observed. The sensor did not cleanly separate the heat flux and temperature signals, as sensors with four leads have consistently done before. Task 7 and 8 discussed in the meeting will be performed with a continuation of funding in 1995. The following is a discussion of each of the tasks performed as outlined in the statement of work dated september 26, 1994. Task 1A was added to cover further investigation into the NASA sensor concept.