Subsonic, Transonic, and Supersonic Wind Tunnels

Most PSP measurements were conducted in high subsonic, transonic and supersonic flows since PSP is most effective in a range of the Mach numbers from 0.3 to 3.0. Experiments on various aerodynamic models with PSP in large production wind tunnels have been made at three NASA Research Centers (Langley, Ames and Glenn), the Boeing Company at Seattle and St. Louis, AEDC, and Wright-Patterson in the United States. Also, PSP has been widely used in wind tunnels at TsAGI in Russia (Bukov et al. 1993, 1997; Troyanovsky et al. 1993; Mosharov et al. 1997), British Aerospace and DERA in Britain (Davies et al. 1995; Holmes 1998), DLR in Germany (Engler et al. 1995, 1997a, 2001b), ONERA in France (Lyonnet et al. 1997), and NAL in Japan (Asai 1999). Besides predominant applications of PSP in external aerodynamic flows, PSP has been used to study supersonic internal flows with complex shock wave structures in turbomachinery (Cler et al. 1996; Lepicovsky 1998; Lepicovsky et al. 1997; Taghavi et al. 1999; Lepicovsky and Bencic 2002). This section describes typical PSP measurements in subsonic, transonic and supersonic flows.