This paper presents experimental results of TSTO (Two-Stage-To-Orbit) aerodynamic heating at hypersonic speed. TSTO is a promising space transportation system consisting of two stages, i.e., an orbiter and a booster, and is supposed to fly in a wide speed range from subsonic to hypersonic. However, when it flies at hypersonic speed, it undergoes severe aerodynamic heating under some conditions. Thus, in order to overcome this crucial problem, researchers are motivated to find how to reduce this heating load. Although there seems to be a lot of factors that could affect the heating, the present work focuses on the effects of TSTO configuration on the heating due to aerodynamic interaction. There are many parameters that influence the heating. In the present study two of these parameters are considered which are; i) the booster configurations and ii) the clearance between the two stages. The flight condition is fixed at a hypersonic speed of M_∞=8.1. First, as a baseline TSTO configuration, a Hemisphere-Cylinder (HC) is employed as orbiter, and a Delta-Wing (DW) as booster. Then, we used a more practical configuration for the booster, i.e., a hypersonic-booster-model (HBM), which has a wider spanwise leading edge on the main wing in addition to a pair of tins. For these two models, their aerodynamic interaction flow fields as well as heating distributions have been examined with various clearance. As a result, the peak heat flux on the HC in the case of the HBM was reduced to half of that in the case of the DW. However, they showed a similar trend with regard to the interaction pattern change from shock/shock interaction to shock/boundary-layer interaction, which occurs when the clearance of the two bodies was increased.
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