Performance of Turbulence Modeling in Simulation of the HIFiRE-1 Flight Test

Abstract

Pressure and heat transfer data from the HIFiRE-1 flight test are employed to evaluate the performance of a turbulence model at different Mach and Reynolds numbers along the flight path. A sequence of three-dimensional structured meshes is employed to discretize the domain consisting of a cone (transition experiment) and a flare (shock–boundary layer interaction experiment) with channel cutouts (mass capture experiment). Variations in model parameters are also explored and the effects are discussed. The overall flow structure agrees with expectations and observations from earlier ground tests, including laminar-to-turbulent transition on the cone, strong shock–boundary layer interactions at the compression corner, and a complex flow in the channel. Trends in predicted surface pressure generally compare well to the flight test data, although the point of separation at the flare is upstream of observation by about 2% of body length, or 20% of separation length in all cases. Heat transfer agreement is good except at an instance in the flight path where the heat transfer magnitude was extremely low and the experimental data exhibit scatter. At this flight condition, pressure predictions, however, are reasonable. Overall, the simulations reproduce the primary quantities of interest if care is exercised in analyzing data.