Abstract
A numerical and experimental study on the aerodynamic heating inside a gap in a hypersonic laminar boundary layer on a flat plate is conducted at a unit Reynolds number of 6.1 × 106 m-1 and a Mach number of 8.1. In this study, two cases: a side-open gap and a side-closed gap are investigated. As a result, It is found that in both cases, the heat flux at the back wall of the gap is predominant only in the upper region of the gap depth. The difference between the side-open gap and the side-closed gap appears only in the side region. In the former case, a free shear layer comes into the gap from outside, which generates a heat flux peak at the side wall edge, while in the latter case such a phenomenon is not observed. In addition, the two cases have similar distributions of heat flux except in the side region. Furthermore, the peak value of heat flux at the back wall is 3-4 times as large as that on the flat plate without a gap at the same location. On the other hand, the heat flux at the side wall of the gap in the case of side-closed gap becomes smaller than that at the back wall; it is less than half as large.
