Ramp Heating in High-Speed Transient Thermal Measurement with Reduced Uncertainty

The uncertainty associated with the convective heat transfer coefficient obtained in transient thermal measurement is often high, especially in high-speed flow. The present study demonstrates that the experimental accuracy could be much improved by an actively controlled ramp heating instead of the conventional step-heating approach. A general design guideline for the proposed ramp-heating method is derived theoretically and further demonstrated by simulation cases. This paper also presents a detailed experimental study for transonic turbine blade-tip heat transfer. A repeatable, high-resolution tip heat transfer coefficient contour is obtained through transient infrared measurement with the proposed ramp-heating method. Detailed uncertainty analysis shows that the resulting heat transfer coefficient uncertainty level is much lower than the experimental data currently available in the open literature. The ramp-heating approach is especially recommended to the high-speed heat transfer experimental research community to improve the accuracy of the transient thermal measurement technique.