Launch vehicles composed of three bodies can experience the shedding of vortices due to strong crossflow acceleration towards the center body, or core. Upon formation, the vortices obstruct the freestream flow, which diverts the local angle of attack towards the opposite side of the core, and a new pair of vortices are formed. This alternate vortex-pair shedding can induce significant pitch structural responses during transonic flight. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations have been used to illustrate the phenomenon and to generate forcing functions for structural dynamic analyses. Structural responses from these analyses are in good agreement with flight responses. This success suggests that CFD can be used for pre-flight predictions of the phenomenon. It also indicates that CFD can be used to supplement wind tunnel data when the test instrumentation does not adequately resolve the alternate vortex-pair shedding.
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