Experimental Facilities

New Wind Tunnel

CEAR has designed a Mach 2.3 and Mach 3.0 supersonic tunnel for studying internal flow dynamics within high speed propulsion configurations. The facility is currently under construction and should be completed during the fall of 2015. This facility is a blow-down wind tunnel with a 6 in x 6 in x 80 in test section. This facility will also be used to study boundary layer effects and advanced diagnostic techniques for high speed flows and have Schleiren Imaging or TSI Particle Image Velocimetry available.

Propulsion Research Facility

In the UTSI Propulsion Research Facility (PRF), there is a GE J85-5H afterburning turbojet that burns JP8 fuel for a full throttle range from idle to full afterburner. Our engine was used in the USAF T-38 Talon aircraft and has an 8-stage, high lift, axial-flow compressor. This piece of equipment is primarily used for diagnostic development.

Vacuum Chambers

The CEAR group has available two vacuum chambers for research.

The first is Chamber 20V wtih a turbomolecular pump with a nitrogen pump speed of 220 liters/second. It measures 22 inches in diameter and 18 inches high with an LN2 cryo-liner.The second is Chamber 11F wtih an LN2 cryo-liner and helium-cooled cryosurface (20K). It has a baseline pressure of 0.1 microtorr and measures 9 feet in diameter and 20 feet long.

Computational Facilities

Maxwell Cluster

For computational investigations, UTSI features a 32-core rack-mounted cluster of Xeon processors, secured on a private network for sensitive calculations. The TEMPEST software has been parallelized and is being deployed on this cluster for high-performance fluid and plasma simulations.