As true with all hypersonic flight, the ability to quickly and accurately predict the aerothermodynamic response of an aircraft in the early design phase is important to not only lower cost, but also to lower the computational and experimental time required to test such parameters. The Mach 6 High Reynolds Number Facility at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio has been non-operational for the past twenty years, but a recent resurgence in the need for accurate hypersonic test facilities has led to the reactivation of the wind tunnel. With its restoration, the facility is to include new capabilities to assess hypersonic aerothermodynamic effects on bodies in Mach 6 flow. Therefore, the objective of this research is to conduct tests in the Mach 6 wind tunnel in which the surface temperature distribution on tunnel models is determined from temperature sensitive paint (TSP). Surface pressure and temperature readings, from pressure taps and thermocouples installed on the models, as well as TSP wall temperature distributions will be used for comparison with results from computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis codes of differing fidelity levels. The comparisons can then be utilized to gain confidence in the accuracy of the aero-thermal response captured at Mach 6 wind tunnel conditions. Two computational codes will be used in order to validate the aero-thermal capabilities of the wind tunnel: the Configuration Based Aerodynamics (CBAero) tool set, an inviscid panel code with viscous approximation capabilities; and the Unstructured Langley Approximate Three-Dimensional Convective Heating (UNLATCH) code, a boundary-layer approximation solver using flow solutions from the Euler code Cart3D. The three tunnel model geometries that will be used for this research are the Reference Flight System model G (RFSG), a Generic Hypersonic Vehicle (GHV), and the Hypersonic International Flight Research Experimentation Program-Flight 1 (HIFiRE-1) payload geometry. Due to current unresolved issues with CBAero and UNLATCH, as well as wind tunnel scheduling delays, one-to-one comparisons of temperature distributions between TSP and the computational codes have not been obtained yet. However, TSP temperature distributions for the HIFiRE-1 geometry have been successfully ascertained at Mach 5.85, and verification studies of the inviscid analyses using CBAero and UNLATCH have been performed and will be presented in this paper.
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