An engineering method of aerothermodynamic environments prediction for complex reentry configuration

This paper develops a feasible engineering method for aerodynamic heating prediction with hypersonic complex vehicles. In this proposed approach, a file format called EMT for unstructured meshes based on trilateral cells is created for the subsequent calculations at first. Then, the inviscid engineering methods for aerodynamic force and the isentropic flow condition are employed to predict the gas properties on the edge of boundary layer, by which the invsicid surface streamlines are integrated for aerodynamic heating prediction. Finally, the combination method of convective heat transfer rate for the complex vehicles is established by coupling the Fay-Riddell method applied for stagnation; approximate methods of flat plate are formulated for downstream region and the empirical method on hemisphere is adopted for the junction zone. Moreover, some techniques of improving the accuracy of results are also investigated. The favourable agreement with experimental data proves that this method used in present paper is available to calculate the aerodynamic heating distributions on complex reentry vehicles like the Space Shuttle Orbiter.