
doi: 10.5772/13890
At designing and modernization of a reentry space vehicle it is required accurate and reliable data on the flow field, aerodynamic characteristics, heat transfer processes. Taking into account the wide range of flow conditions, realized at hypersonic flight of the vehicle in the atmosphere, it leads to the need to incorporate in employed theoretical models the effects of rarefaction, viscous-inviscid interaction, flow separation, laminar-turbulent transition and a variety of physical and chemical processes occurring in the gas phase and on the vehicle surface. Getting the necessary information through laboratory and flight experiments requires considerable expenses. In addition, the reproduction of hypersonic flight conditions at ground experimental facilities is in many cases impossible. As a result the theoretical simulation of hypersonic flow past a spacecraft is of great importance. Use of numerical calculations with their relatively small cost provides with highly informative flow data and gives an opportunity to reproduce a wide range of flow conditions, including the conditions that cannot be reached in ground experimental facilities. Thus numerical simulation provides the transfer of experimental data obtained in laboratory tests on the flight conditions. One of the main problems that arise at designing a spacecraft reentering the Earth’s atmosphere with orbital velocity is the precise definition of high convective heat fluxes (aerodynamic heating) to the vehicle surface at hypersonic flight. In a dense atmosphere, where the assumption of continuity of gas medium is true, a detailed analysis of parameters of flow and heat transfer of a reentry vehicle may be made on the basis of numerical integration of the Navier-Stokes equations allowing for the physical and chemical processes in the shock layer at hypersonic flight conditions. Taking into account the increasing complexity of practical problems, a task of verification of employed physical models and numerical techniques arises by means of comparison of computed results with experimental data. In this chapter some results are presented of calculations of perfect gas and real air flow, which have been obtained using a computer code developed by the author (Gorshkov, 1997). The code solves twoor three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations cast in conservative form in arbitrary curvilinear coordinate system using the implicit iteration scheme (Yoon & Jameson, 1987). Three gas models have been used in the calculations: perfect gas, equilibrium and nonequilibrium chemically reacting air. Flow is supposed to be laminar. The first two cases considered are hypersonic flow of a perfect gas at wind tunnel conditions. In experiments conducted at the Central Research Institute of Machine Building
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