High Enthalpy Testing and CFD Rebuilding of X-38 in HEG

Ground based testing of X-38 was performed in the High Enthalpy Shock Tunnel Göttingen (HEG) of the German Aerospace Center (DLR). Parallel to this testing program Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) rebuilding was employed using the DLR Navier-Stokes solver CEVCATS-N. The Model E, which is a 1:24 scaled wind tunnel model of the X-38 vehicle, was used to obtain the first surface heat flux and pressure measurements of this configuration in the high enthalpy flow regime. Two different HEG operating conditions with total enthalpies of 12MJ/kg and 22MJ/kg were used