A New Aircraft Inlet for Sampling Interstitial Aerosol: Design Methodology, Modeling, and Wind Tunnel Tests

The design of a new aerosol sampler, called the blunt-body aerosol sampler (BASE), to sample interstitial particles inside clouds while avoiding the problem of cloud droplet shatter artifacts is introduced. The primary design feature of the inlet is a blunt body that houses an aerosol inlet toward its aft end. The housing is designed to be blunt enough to deflect large cloud particles traveling around the body while being streamlined enough to maintain an attached boundary layer under aircraft flow conditions. The attached flow requirement ensures that shatter particles formed from the impaction of cloud droplets on the blunt body are retained close to the surface of the body. A region of large particle shadow is, thus, created in the aft of the blunt-body housing, where an aerosol inlet can sample interstitial particles in the absence of cloud particles. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations are used to optimize the shape of the blunt body, and the final sampler design is predicted to sample par...