Survey of viscous interactions associated with high Mach number flight

Abstract

T most severe problems of atmospheric flight at high Mach numbers are associated with viscous-inviscid interactions. Cruise vehicles for Mach numbers above four and lifting re-entry vehicles have highly complex three-dimensional configurations in which exist many regions of high compression that can cause boundary layers to separate. Although separation can result in loss of control effectiveness or flow degradation in an engine inlet, flow reattachment gives rise to heat rates that can far exceed those for an attached boundary layer. A further, and possibly far more severe viscous interaction problem is the impingement of shock waves generated by the forebody and other external components of a vehicle on aft sections resulting in local heat rates that may be many times larger than stagnation point values. Peak heating conditions may be laminar for lifting re-entry configurations, though our knowledge of boundary layertransition is far from adequate so that transitional and turbulent flows cannot be ruled out. However, Reynolds num, bers of potential high Mach number cruise vehicles are high— 10 to 10—so that viscous interactions will be predominately associated with turbulent boundary layers and their attendant higher heat rates. The high local heat rates resulting from viscous interactions cause hot spots that could lead to catastrophic failure. Vivid examples of damage resulting from viscous interactions are given in Figs. 1 and 2. A ventral pylon on the X-15 airplane, shown in Fig. 1, caused high^local heating of the fuselage around its root, and developed large holes near its tip due to the impingement of the shock wave from a dummy ramjet it supported, during a flight at Mach 6.7 in 1967. A study of the flowfield of the pylon-mounted dummy ramjet configuration is reported in Ref. 1. Figure 2 shows considerable damage due to interaction heating to the underside of a sled and its supporting slipper as a result of a run at 7000 fps on the 7-mile test track at Holloman Air Force Base. Unlike stagnation-point heating the location is obvious, the problem with complex configurations is to determine where high heat rates are likely to occur, as well as their magnitude. It is the purpose of this paper to identify some potentially critical areas of viscous interactions associated with high Mach number vehicles and briefly review our state of knowledge in these areas with emphasis on the basic flow phenomena.