Hypersonic Aerodynamics of a Free-flying Ring Interfering With a Two-dimensional Curved Shock Wave - an Experimental Test Case

The aerodynamics of a free-flying ring model interfering with a steady crossflow cylinder in Mach 14 cold hypersonic flow has been investigated experimentally in the VKI Longshot facility.
A ring model was initially suspended at a 90-degree incidence upstream to a transversely mounted cylinder.
Upon the arrival of the flow, the ring's thin support wires rupture, allowing the model to fly freely and interfere with the two-dimensional shock generated by the stationary cylinder.
High-speed schlieren flow visualization has been performed to capture the motion of the model, and its trajectory and attitude were inferred using a synthetic image fitting algorithm.
A set of freestream probes were used to measure the transient flow properties and to rebuild all flow conditions.
The aerodynamic properties of the ring were computed based on the freestream dynamic pressure and the velocities and accelerations derived from the trajectory.
The experiment and the results serve as validation data for the Test Case 2022 of the Aerothermodynamics and Design for Demise (ATD3) Working Group.