COMBUSTION OF A SLENDER GRAPHITE ROD IN HIGH ENTHALPY HYPERSONIC AIR FLOW

High temperature combustion of graphite is a subject of interest for different engineering disciplines: it has practical implications in coal combustion for energy production as well as in the development of materials for aerospace application such as ablative carbon heat-shields and carbon-carbon composites (C/C-composites). The complexity of the heterogeneous reaction of carbon with oxygen at very high temperature, couples here with the understanding of chemical reactions in the gas-phase and the description of the fluid-dynamics of supersonic and hypersonic flows. The paper presents the results obtained by the joint activity of two research groups, committed respectively to solid fuel combustion and to aerospace engineering. In a previous paper the research group developed and tested an innovative experimental protocol for the investigation of graphite combustion in supersonic air flows and used a simple theoretical model to correlate the results. In the present paper the previous results and the ones of another test campaign, performed in hypersonic flow conditions, are correlated with a theoretical model of graphite combustion due to A. Makino