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ACTA AERONAUTICAET ASTRONAUTICA SINICA

   

Aerodynamic Environments for Hypersonic Flight

Wu Zi-niu   

  • Received:2014-12-01 Revised:2014-12-02 Published:2014-12-04
  • Contact: Wu Zi-niu

Abstract: Modern hypersonic vehicles have local non-streamlined obstacles, operate at lower turbulent environment with high Mach number and lower Reynolds number, and cruise in air subjected to shock and friction heating. Due to these factors, hypersonic flows are full of strong local flow structures such as strong shock waves and thick boundary layers, with severe interactions between them. Aerodynamic heating is strengthened locally by such interactions. A number of critical phenomena such as transition and pressure perturbations are quite sensitive and the competitive influences of wave and frictional drags make the lift to drag ratio to have a barrier. All these are not simply dependent on the Mach number and Reynolds number, but also dependent on many dimensional parameters, so that modelling by ground facilities is difficult and a combined study by theory, numerical study and experimental measurement is necessary to solve an engineering problem. In this paper, we give an overview on the start-of-art knowledge of the most important and critical physics of hypersonic flow and discuss methods to solve hypersonic flow problems in the most possible effective way. This review and discussion are hopefully useful for further fundamental studies and for bringing a bridge between fundamental study and engineering applications.

Key words: Hypersonic flow, Critical phenomena, Influence factor