Superposition Method for Force Estimations on Bodies in Supersonic and Hypersonic Flows

Abstract

Aerodynamic interactions of fragments of meteoroids and space debris during atmospheric entry influence the flight trajectories of the fragments and their strewn field on the Earth’s surface as well as the meteoroids’ airburst altitude and energy deposition rate in the atmosphere and thus the resulting ground damage. For the design of experiments in the Hypersonic Wind Tunnel H2K of DLR, German Aerospace Center in Cologne to investigate the interaction phenomena, a method is developed to estimate the forces on two interacting bodies in supersonic and hypersonic flows, which is more accurate than existing analytical and semi-analytical methods and more efficient than numerical simulations regarding the computational effort. It is based on the superposition of flowfields taken from a database of numerical simulations of a single body for a range of Mach numbers. Furthermore, three-dimensional computations of configurations of interacting bodies are carried out by NASA Ames Research Center. Results obtained with the superposition method are compared to the simulations by NASA and to results of computations that can be found in the literature. The results from the method show good agreement with the computations.