Computational Flowfield Analysis over a Blunt-Body Reentry Vehicle

摘要

This paper deals with aerodynamic and aerothermodynamic studies carried out to design a capsule vehicle suitable for the recovery of crew members from the International Space Station and/or from exploration missions to the moon or Mars. An integrated design tool called ENTRY is used to support vehicle reentry analysis and computational fluid dynamics design activities. A possible low-Earth-orbit reentry scenario, with the associated aeroheating environment, is generated and then analyzed. Several Euler and Navier-Stokes computations are performed to simulate the flowfield past the vehicle, for both perfect-gas and nonequilibrium reacting-gas models for the air. Numerical results and their comparison with flight data and wind-tunnel data are presented. An analysis of flowfields, obtained from numerical computations, is provided by means of flight forces and moments coefficients. Experimentally measured surface pressure distributions and aerodynamic coefficients compare rather well with numerical results.