Abstract
The demand for discovering new commercial routes as well as the possibility to shortening civilian long-haul flights boosted the interest of civil hypersonic vehicle designs. Among all the multiple projects started by the various nations, the European community funded project STRATOFLY aims at refining the baseline LAPCAT II-MR2.4 design for further improvements. The new aircraft would enable a flight shorter that 3 hours from Brussels to Sydney, carrying 300-passengers above the already crowed atmosphere. The wide Mach range operability, up to Mach 8, demands the use of multiple engines, leading to a highly integrated propulsion system. The current study is focused on the development of new CFD platform to estimate the performance of the combined propulsion system during the supersonic to hypersonic transition. In order to control the complex flow physics, highfidelity CFD simulations remain the fundamental tools for the preliminary investigations. On the current framework, an advanced robust compressible solver has been develop d in order to handle the different flow regimes. The new tool solves Unsteady Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (URANS) equations by employing cell-centered Finite Volume Method constructed on openFoam toolbox. Two innovative high-order discretization schemes, with different abilities, based on approximated Riemann solvers were developed for capturing the flow physics within high-speed propulsion systems. Advanced time discretization has been taken into account to increase the temporal accuracy. At the end, the whole implementation has been validated in multiple test cases, ranging from incompressible to hypersonic regimes, confirming its excellent stability, robustness and accuracy.
Highlights
Use During the last century, several international programs has started with focus on hypersonic vehicle designs
The Russian CIAM program performed the first test on a Dual Mode Ramjet (DMR), the Australian HyShot2 program [1] as well as the recent American Hyper-X program [2] demonstrated the possibility of a stable air-breathing hypersonic flight
The first European interest in civil supersonic and hypersonic flight was first represented by the European Community (EC) funded ATLLAS I project in 2008 [3]
Summary
Use During the last century, several international programs has started with focus on hypersonic vehicle designs. The idea is to take as reference vehicle the LAPCAT MR2.4, making some changes in order to shorten the civil flight time of an order of magnitude with respect to the current state of art of civil aviation Such investigations include several research areas, e.g. supersonic combustion, pollution, noise emission, lightweight structures and a deep investigation of the newer combined propulsion system. The ability to fully control the complex flow physics of these advanced systems is fundamental to develop hypersonic vehicles. At this moment, no facilities are present to test full scale models and no appropriate scaling rules have been found. The tool will be used to evaluate the nozzle performances of the LAPCAT II-MR2.4 concept
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