Aerodynamic analysis of a hypersonic vehicle with multidisk aerospikes

Abstract

Enormous research has taken place in the recent year in order to reduce the aerodynamic drag and heating resulting from high speed and shape of the blunt cone for hypersonic vehicles. These still possess a great challenge in the design of supersonic and hypersonic vehicles as the aerodynamic drag varies with velocity as (𝑉∞)2, whereas the aerodynamic heating increases as(𝑉∞)3. The increase in heating and drag associated with hypersonic speed had a significant impact on the design of hypersonic space vehicle. Modifying the flowfield structure ahead of the main body can result in substantial reduction both in aerodynamic drag and heating. One such method is the use of spike; a passive flow control device. Many researches in the past have addressed the reduction in drag and aerodynamic heating with the use of spike. Most of the paper available in published literature reports the effect of l/D ratios, but the effect of aero disk size is not studied. It is obvious that size of aero disk significantly modifies the flow field ahead of the blunt body and hence affects the aerodynamic parameters. Therefore the aerodisk spikes can be regarded as a potential contestant for drag reduction. The effect of spike length, nose configuration, aerodisk radius, and effectiveness of the multidisc aerospikes by varying intermediate positioning of the rearward aerodisk has been studied extensively in the current research.