NASA’s Unsteady Pressure-Sensitive Paint Phase I Development Overview

Since 2019, a group out of NASA Ames Research Center(ARC)has been focused on implementing systematic updates to make unsteady pressure-sensitive paint (uPSP) a more viable capability for production wind tunnel testing. Focusing on the general categories of data acquisition, data transfer, data processing, and data visualization, the uPSP Development Team has made several improvements to increase data quality and innovate a more workable system that would provide valuable surface pressure data to customers. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and several initial demonstration tests prior to the formal start of the development effort, the decision was made to focus on launch vehicles as the test article. To-date this development has focused on implementation in the ARC Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel 11-by11-footTransonic Wind Tunnel due to the large optical access of the test section and that the NASA Advanced Supercomputer is located at ARC. This paper summarizes the project origins and the results of four years of development effort, which will all culminate in a final demonstration test in the first half of2024.