Numerical Study on Hypersonic Flow and Aerodynamic Heating

Abstract

A finite difference unsteady coupled heat transfer solver was developed. Such solver was ultilized to simulate the hypersonic flow over backward step and a transverse gap, and the unsteady thermal conduction in an infinite circular pipe. The backward facing step lead to local dramatically changing distributions of aerodynamic parameters and wall heat flux. The gas flow in the gap decelerated rapidly along with the increase in gap depth, and there was rather weak convective heat transfer at the bottom of the gap. In the case of hypersonic flow around the infinitely long circular tube, there was large temperature gradient in the boundary layer, the wall temperature increased with time, otherwise the aerodynamic parameters outside the boundary layer changed quite slightly. The predicted results were in great agreement with the tested ones. The ability of the developed solver to the predict flow and aerodynamic heating on the hypersonic vehicles is verified by the study.