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Greer, Donald

Publications and source records attributed to Greer, Donald.

Design and Predictions for High-Altitude (Low Reynolds Number) Aerodynamic Flight Experiment

A sailplane being developed at NASA Dryden Flight Research Center will support a high-altitude flight experiment. The experiment will measure the performance parameters or an airfoil at high altitudes (70,000 - 100,000 ft), low Reynolds numbers (2 x 10(exp 5) - 7 x 10(exp 5)), and high subsonic Mach numbers (0.5 and 0.65). The airfoil section lift and drag are determined from pilot and static pressure measurements. The locations of the separation bubble, Tollmien-Schlichting boundary-layer instability frequencies, and vortex shedding are measured from a hot-film strip. The details of the planned flight experiment are presented as well as several predictions of the airfoil performance.

Greer, Donald

Design and Predictions for a High-Altitude (Low-Reynolds-Number) Aerodynamic Flight Experiment

A sailplane being developed at NASA Dryden Flight Research Center will support a high-altitude flight experiment. The experiment will measure the performance parameters of an airfoil at high altitudes (70,000 to 100,000 ft), low Reynolds numbers (200,000 to 700,000), and high subsonic Mach numbers (0.5 and 0.65). The airfoil section lift and drag are determined from pitot and static pressure measurements. The locations of the separation bubble, Tollmien-Schlichting boundary layer instability frequencies, and vortex shedding are measured from a hot-film strip. The details of the planned flight experiment are presented. Several predictions of the airfoil performance are also presented. Mark Drela from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology designed the APEX-16 airfoil, using the MSES code. Two-dimensional Navier-Stokes analyses were performed by Mahidhar Tatineni and Xiaolin Zhong from the University of California, Los Angeles, and by the authors at NASA Dryden.

Greer, Donald

Cryogenic Fuel Tank Draining Analysis Model

One of the technological challenges in designing advanced hypersonic aircraft and the next generation of spacecraft is developing reusable flight-weight cryogenic fuel tanks. As an aid in the design and analysis of these cryogenic tanks, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model has been developed specifically for the analysis of flow in a cryogenic fuel tank. This model employs the full set of Navier-Stokes equations, except that viscous dissipation is neglected in the energy equation. An explicit finite difference technique in two-dimensional generalized coordinates, approximated to second-order accuracy in both space and time is used. The stiffness resulting from the low Mach number is resolved by using artificial compressibility. The model simulates the transient, two-dimensional draining of a fuel tank cross section. To calculate the slosh wave dynamics the interface between the ullage gas and liquid fuel is modeled as a free surface. Then, experimental data for free convection inside a horizontal cylinder are compared with model results. Finally, cryogenic tank draining calculations are performed with three different wall heat fluxes to demonstrate the effect of wall heat flux on the internal tank flow field.

Greer, Donald

Modeling of the transient ignition of a nonmetal/oxygen system by heterogeneous reaction - Effects of oxygen pressure

A theoretical model of the transient ignition of a nonmetallic polymer in a pure oxygen environment was developed and used to assess the safety of an oxygen system under elevated pressure. Results demonstrated that, for a general oxygen system, the ignition temperautre is sensitive to the external heating rate as well as such system parameters as the minimum ignition heat flux and the corresponding minimum ignition temperature. As the oxygen pressure increases, the minimum ignition temperature decreases, until, at a sufficiently high oxygen pressure, spontaneous ignition occurs. Numerical results generated by the model were correlated with the reported ignition data for polyethylene, Teflon, and nylon.

Yuen, Walter W.