Blunt Cone Transition

The large conical model to be used for blunt cone transition experiments.

It is well known that blunting the nose of a cone a in a hypersonic flow by a small amount will increase its transition Reynolds number. However, at a point increasing the bluntness further will lower the transition Reynolds number of the cone; the reasons for this are unknown and this phenomena is known as the blunt body paradox. A brand new large conical model with an attached traverse allowing for wall normal pressure measurements has been fabricated by the talented technicians at the University of Notre Dame and is uniquely large enough to allow for natural transition in quiet flow. This model will be extensively tested in the new Large Mach 6 Quiet tunnel to investigate the blunt body paradox and the use of nose bluntness for transition control.