Shock estimation in supersonic vehicles

Improving the design of future high-Mach vehicles is crucial to enhance performance,safety and sustainability of future air travel. Advanced designs can be realized by improving low fidelity modelling in the context of Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO) on one side and making the use of high fidelity tools more efficient in the context of Multi-fidelity Design Approaches (MFDA) on the other.This thesis presents the formulation of an advanced low order model for the estimation of the shock structure generated by vehicles flying in the supersonic and hypersonic regimes. Taking as inputs the geometry and the flow conditions, the proposed approach addresses, in one cohesive methodology, attached and detached shocks in two and three dimensions as well as shock structures composed of multiple shocks. The procedure is based on classical supersonic flow theories and has been verified against computational fluid dynamics simulations.The proposed methodology allows for a cost-effective estimation of shock wave patterns and their impingement on the vehicle surface on one side, while on the other it can be used to realize a-priori shock-fitted meshes reducing someof the uncertainty while generating them for high-fidelity CFD simulations.Improving the design of future high-Mach vehicles is crucial to enhance performance,safety and sustainability of future air travel. Advanced designs can be realized by improving low fidelity modelling in the context of Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO) on one side and making the use of high fidelity tools more efficient in the context of Multi-fidelity Design Approaches (MFDA) on the other.This thesis presents the formulation of an advanced low order model for the estimation of the shock structure generated by vehicles flying in the supersonic and hypersonic regimes. Taking as inputs the geometry and the flow conditions, the proposed approach addresses, in one cohesive methodology, attached and detached shocks in two and three dimensions as well as shock structures composed of multiple shocks. The procedure is based on classical supersonic flow theories and has been verified against computational fluid dynamics simulations.The proposed methodology allows for a cost-effective estimation of shock wave patterns and their impingement on the vehicle surface on one side, while on the other it can be used to realize a-priori shock-fitted meshes reducing someof the uncertainty while generating them for high-fidelity CFD simulations