A high-temperature assessment of air-cooled unsteady pressure transducers

This paper discusses the problem of measuring unsteady pressure in a high-temperature environment using standard transducers. Commercially available cooling adaptars for these transducers use water as the cooling medium to provide thermal protection. This arrangement is suitable only for some test bed applications and not suitable for integration into in-flight active control systems. An assessment of the cooling effectiveness of a commercial water-cooled adapter using air as the cooling medium is presented using an experimentally validated finite element heat transfer model. The assessment indicates survival of an air-cooled transducer, itself rated to 235 degrees C, at source flow temperatures up to 800 degrees C.