PRELIMINARY AERODYNAMIC PERFORMANCE OF THE PRORA-USV EXPERIMENTAL VEHICLE

摘要

The PRORA-USV is an unmanned space vehicle to be used as a flight test bed to develop and demonstrate the key technologies applicable to the future reusable space transportation vehicles; to do this, the PRORA-USV shall perform different flight missions with different objectives. The present paper contains the main results of the PRORA-USV aerodynamic and aerothermodynamic activity performed in CIRA and aimed only to the preliminary characterization of the vehicle. The vehicle preliminary configuration used in this work has been provided directly by the PRORA-USV team. The aerodynamic results cover different flow regimes from subsonic to hypersonic conditions. To develop the preliminary aerodynamic database of the PRORA-USV a set of CFD non-viscous simulations has been performed; an engineering approach has been used to evaluate the skin friction and base forces contributions. For the aerothermodynamic analysis an engineering approach (by using simplified formulas) has been employed to calculate the maximum nose and wing leading edge heat flux along the whole PRORA-USV flight paths. All the aerodynamic and aerothermodynamic results have been analyzed to obtain a large amount of information on the performances of the PRORA-USV vehicle; the database has been also used by the PRORA-USV project team to design and verify different components of the vehicle.