Shock-Shock Interaction Heating

The X-15 program encountered the best-known example of the high localized heating rates that are possible in

shock-shock interactions. A pylon-mounted dummy scramjet fell off the aircraft during

flight 188 (see Thompson, At the Edge of Space: The X-15 Program, Smithsonian Inst. Press, 1992).

This was caused by intense shock-interaction heating at Mach 6 to 7. Page 43 (PDF page 48)

of NASA SP-2000-4522, at

shows a photograph of the melted Inconel pylon that resulted from the interaction heating

(the photograph cannot be extracted from this password-protected document,

downloaded from the NASA Dryden website). Heating rates can rise by an order of

magnitude above the heating rates that would otherwise be seen.

For more details, see, for example, the discussion on pp. 532-554 of John Bertin,

Hypersonic Aerothermodynamics, AIAA, 1994, or pp. 321-323 of John Anderson, Jr.,

Hypersonic and High Temperature Gas Dynamics, AIAA, 2000. Details on the X-15 example

can be found in NASA-TM-X-1669, Flight Experience with Shock Impingement and

Interference Heating on the X-15-2 Research Airplane, Joe D. Watts, October 1968.