Design, Fabrication, Calibration and Testing of Shock Tube Impulse Test Facility

Ground-based testing facilities are very crucial and helpful in conducting experiments for various aerodynamics studies such as flow analysis, estimation of aerodynamic forces, heat transfer analysis etc. As the initial phase of the study, similar to the available ground-based facility, a shock tube has been designed with different geometrical configurations to conduct the experiments with different aerodynamic test models at several test conditions. Each section of the designed shock tube is further fabricated with SS304 stainless steel material by keeping safety in mind under high-pressure working conditions. Before conducting experiments in a shock tube, a calibration experiment is important to understand the workings of the shock tube by estimating the shock tube parameters such as Shock Mach Number, Reflected Shock Mach Number, etc. After completion of calibration, an aerodynamic drag force study is performed to test this facility. For this, initially, an experiment was conducted with piezofilms-based stress wave force balance along with the hemispherical model by mounting at the end of the shock tube. Dynamic calibration of model-balance assembly is also performed to estimate the System Response Function by employing the well-developed force prediction algorithm, i.e., De-convolution and ANFIS after training. A trained algorithms are further used to predict the drag force over the designed test model from strain-time history responses. This Chapter mainly focused on the design, fabrication, and calibration of a new shock tube facility. Testing of the shock tube facility has been done in a simple manner.