Abstract
For the past few years a program has been under way to obtain reliable data on the rate of heat transfer to air moving at supersonic speeds. The investigation was limited to air flowing at supersonic speeds in a round tube. The program was divided into two separate parts, the first for measurement of the adiabatic wall temperatures of a supersonic stream and the second for the heat-transfer rate. The first part of this program is described here. The details of three experimental test combinations used to measure the adiabatic wall temperature and local state of a supersonic stream of air are presented. The experimental data for forty runs, in the form of measured pressure and temperature distributions, are included. The range of diameter Reynolds number covered is from 0.15 × 105 to 5 × 105. The length Reynolds number extends to 120 × 105. The Mach number at the inlet to the round tube is about 2.6. The calculated quantities such as the local apparent friction coefficient, recovery factor, local Mach number, and so forth, are obtained from the simple one-dimensional flow model for which the properties of the stream are uniform at any cross section of the tube and boundary-layer effects are ignored. A subsequent paper deals with the calculation of these quantities when account is taken of the boundary-layer growth in the tube on the basis of a two-dimensional flow model.