A Sample of NASA Langley Unsteady Pressure Experiments for Computational Aerodynamics Code Evaluation

As computational fluid dynamics methods mature, code development is rapidly transitioning from prediction of steady flowfields to unsteady flows. This change in emphasis offers a number of new challenges to the research community, not the least of which is obtaining detailed, accurate unsteady experimental data with which to evaluate new methods. Researchers at NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC) have been actively measuring unsteady pressure distributions for nearly 40 years. Over the last 20 years, these measurements have focused on developing high-quality datasets for use in code evaluation. This paper provides a sample of unsteady pressure measurements obtained by LaRC and available for government, university, and industry researchers to evaluate new and existing unsteady aerodynamic analysis methods. A number of cases are highlighted and discussed with attention focused on the unique character of the individual datasets and their perceived usefulness for code evaluation. Ongoing LaRC research in this area is also presented.