Fluid-thermal analysis of aerodynamic heating over spiked blunt body configurations

Abstract

When flying at hypersonic speeds, the spiked blunt body is constantly subjected to severe aerodynamic heating. To illustrate the thermal response of different configurations and the relevant flow field variation, a loosely-coupled fluid-thermal analysis is performed in this paper. The Mesh-based parallel Code Coupling Interface (MpCCI) is adopted to implement the data exchange between the fluid solver and the thermal solver. The results indicate that increases in spike diameter and length will result in a sharp decline of the wall temperature along the spike, and the overall heat flux is remarkably reduced to less than 300W/cm2 with the aerodome mounted at the spike tip. Moreover, the presence and evolution of small vortices within the recirculation zone are observed and proved to be induced by the stagnation effect of reattachment points on the spike. In addition, the drag coefficient of the configuration with a doubled spike length presents a maximum drop of 4.59% due to the elevated wall temperature. And the growing difference of the drag coefficient is further increased during the accelerating process.