A scaling procedure for measuring thermal structural vibration generated by wall pressure fluctuation

This paper attempts to develop a scaling procedure to measure structural vibration caused simultaneously by wall pressure fluctuations and the thermal load of hypersonic flow by a wind tunnel test. However, simulating the effect of thermal load is difficult with a scaled model in a wind tunnel due to the nonlinear effect of thermal load on a structure. In this work, the temperature variation of a structure is proposed to indicate the nonlinear effect of the thermal load, which provides a means to simulate both the thermal load and wall pressure fluctuations of a hypersonic Turbulent Boundary Layer (TBL) in a wind tunnel test. To validate the scaling procedure, both numerical computations and measurements are performed in this work. Theoretical results show that the scaling procedure can also be adapted to the buckling temperature of a structure even though the scaling procedure is derived from a reference temperature below the critical temperature of the structure. For the measurement, wall pressure fluctuations and thermal environment are simulated by creating hypersonic flow in a wind tunnel. Some encouraging results demonstrate the effectiveness of the scaling procedure for assessing structural vibration generated by hypersonic flow. The scaling procedure developed in this study will provide theoretical support to develop a new measurement technology to evaluate vibration of aircraft due to hypersonic flow.