Drag Reduction Optimization for Hypersonic Blunt Body with Aerospikes

Orion MPCV (Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle) is one of the state-of-the-art manned space vehicles nowadays which will engage in the deep space missions in the near future. Besides, Orion spacecraft is a kind of blunt body, thus the phenomena concerning the high levels of pressure drag and aerodynamic heating are experienced during the atmospheric re-entry process. Pressure drag and aeroheating stirred by the shock wave is the main challenge of hypersonic flight. Therefore, both aerospikes and aerodisks can be efficiently utilised as the approach for drag reduction. In this thesis, we would research the effect of different geometric shapes of aerospikes with different disk gap widths on drag reduction. Accordingly, we implemented a series of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation work to investigate the behaviour as to hypersonic flow over aerospiked blunt bodies. Moreover, the drag reduction efficiency of spiked blunt bodies would be acquired via Kriging method. For the models we studied, we found that the drag on the spiked blunt bodies is much lower than the spike off one. The drag reduction efficiency especially would be predominated by the scale of recirculation zone, which increases as both the spike length and the gap size of aerodisk increase.補正完