Laboratory modeling of hypersonic flight conditions

Important issues associated with hypersonic flight include communication blackout, thermal and mechanical loads to the vehicle body etc. Availability of the tools capable to model and predict conditions of hypersonic flight is required to mitigate these issues. Nowadays, conditions of hypersonic flight are primarily modeled using laboratory experiments with hypersonic wind tunnels and numerical codes. However, utilization of wind tunnels is fairly complicated and expensive, and often do not provide complete set of parameters. At the same time, numerical codes require detailed experimental datasets in order to verify and tune the code to achieve adequate prediction accuracy. In this work we propose a novel approach to model the conditions of hypersonic flight in a simple laboratory experiment. The idea of this approach is to utilize hypersonic arc-plasma jet which is being naturally generated in cathodic arc discharge. Utilization of different cathode materials can provide range of plasma jet speeds corresponding to Mach 5-10.