An aerodynamic study of a rigid Tension Cone (RTC) inflatable-like configuration was conducted. The study was focused on mainly two extreme portions of a wind tunnel test configuration of the RTC to select a computational fluid dynamic (CFD) model. The test conditions varied from Mach 1.65 to Mach 4.5 free stream speed, at angles of attack of zero degree to 20°, and at Reynolds numbers of 0.54 million to one million. Three areas of interests were investigated, namely validation of the aerodynamic coefficients, pressure mapping, and influence of the presence of sting on aerodynamic coefficients. The objectives of the study were to identify and determine the quickest ways to achieve reasonably converged solutions in aerodynamic analysis of RTC using the current unstructured CFD tool sets used at NASA Langley Research Center. The examination of the results against the wind tunnel test data made it possible to show the accuracy of all methodologies used in this study, e.g. the axial force values from wind tunnel data were within 3.0%. The analytical efforts in mapping the wind tunnel pressure readings to those form CFD results showed a similar trend and match as well.
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