Stability Analysis of Hypervelocity Ballistic-Range Data

This paper analyzes hypervelocity ballistic-range transition experiments performed by Sheetz using the STABL and CHAMPS stability techniques. Comparison between the two computational techniques is performed for two experiments and the stability calculations are found to be nominally consistent. In the experiments where the second mode should dominate transition, the N-factor of transition was found to be higher than that in a conventional hypersonic facility. An assessment was conducted of the spread of the N-factor at the transition location for a subset of experiments where the geometry and physics governing transition should be the same. Conventional transition location correlations are presented and, although they are not mechanism based, the correlations do appear to separate the data into distinct groupings which can inform further mechanism-based analysis.