Separation process of spheres in hypersonic flows

Separation process of spheres has been examined experimentally. Behaviours of a single sphere and two identical spheres were investigated. Shock tunnel experiments were conducted in a Mach-6 flow, with three different flow conditions corresponding to an altitude of 60, 65, and 70 km. Four cases having different diameters and materials were used. The circle hough transform and the local adaptive thresholding techniques were used to follow the spheres based on visualization. For the two spheres, symmetrical separation was observed, and final lateral velocities and accelerations were obtained. Also, the final lateral velocities were compared with the well known Passey and Melosh’s theory. It was found that the constant C in the theory was determined to be approximately 0.04 for the two spheres.