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Space debris interaction across a two-dimensional oblique shock wave

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Abstract

The accumulation of space debris objects on Earth’s orbit is raising environmental and safety concerns yielding an urgent need to develop Design for Demise methodologies. Free-flight testing in hypersonic wind tunnels has shown superior capabilities to conventional sting-supported model experiments using aerodynamic balances for analyzing debris objects, providing accurate aerodynamic databases, and testing fragment separation scenarios. An upgraded image processing methodology has been applied to investigate experimentally the aerodynamics of a free-flying inter-stage rocket element that interferes with a two-dimensional oblique shock wave. The study was carried out in the VKI Longshot facility in Mach 14 cold hypersonic flow. The annular ring model was initially suspended at \(90{^\circ },~60{^\circ },~0{^\circ }\) incidence upstream of a transversely mounted cylinder. Upon the arrival of the flow, the model is automatically released, flies freely and interferes with a two-dimensional shock generated by a steady crossflow cylinder. The interference induces a notable flow-normal velocity even at early stages of the interaction, promoting a shock wave surfing motion. The comparison of the experiments showed that when such an irregular object interferes with an oblique shock wave, the result of the interaction highly depends on the way the shock wave is crossed.

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Availability of data and materials

Supplementary material No. 1 compiles freestream flow conditions, model trajectory coordinates, incidences, velocities, accelerations, and aerodynamic coefficients at every 0.5 ms for the annular model at \(\theta _0=90{^\circ }\) initial incidence experiment. Supplementary material No. 2 includes montages of the schlieren/shadowgraph images recorded during the experiments. Complete dataset can be provided on request to the corresponding author.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express their special thanks of gratitude to Ing. Mikel Spillemaekers for his help in conducting the experiments.

Funding

The authors did not receive support from any organization for the submitted work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Aeronautics and Aerospace Department, von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics, Waterloosesteenweg 72, 1640, Sint-Genesius-Rode, Belgium

    Dániel G. Kovács, Guillaume Grossir & Olivier Chazot

  2. Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Department, University of Liège, Allée de la Découverte 9, 4000, Liège, Belgium

    Dániel G. Kovács & Grigorios Dimitriadis

  3. Turbomachinery and Propulsion Department, von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics, Waterloosesteenweg 72, 1640, Sint-Genesius-Rode, Belgium

    Grigorios Dimitriadis

Authors
  1. Dániel G. Kovács
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  2. Guillaume Grossir
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  3. Grigorios Dimitriadis
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  4. Olivier Chazot
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Contributions

Guillaume Grossir, Olivier Chazot, and Grigorios Dimitriadis supervised and guided the work of Dániel G. Kovács. Dániel G. Kovács and Guillaume Grossir have conducted the experiments. Guillaume Grossir developed the processing algorithms and Dániel G. Kovács reworked them and improved the image analysis techniques. Dániel G. Kovács wrote the main manuscript text and prepared the figures. All authors reviewed the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Dániel G. Kovács.

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Kovács, D.G., Grossir, G., Dimitriadis, G. et al. Space debris interaction across a two-dimensional oblique shock wave. Exp Fluids 64, 146 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00348-023-03686-9

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