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Advances in Aircraft and Spacecraft Science Volume 2, Number 2, April 2015 , pages 109-124 DOI: https://doi.org/10.12989/aas.2015.2.2.109 |
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Assessment of the aerodynamic and aerothermodynamic performance of a high-lift reentry vehicle |
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Giuseppe Pezzella
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| Abstract | ||
| This paper deals with the aerodynamic and aerothermodynamic trade-off analysis of a hypersonic flying test bed. Such vehicle will have to be launched with an expendable launcher and shall reenter the Earth atmosphere allowing to perform several experiments on critical re-entry phenomena. The demonstrator under study is a re-entry space glider characterized by a relatively simple vehicle architecture able to validate hypersonic aerothermodynamic design database and passenger experiments, including thermal shield and hot structures. A summary review of the aerodynamic characteristics of two flying test bed concepts, compliant with a phase-A design level, has been provided hereinafter. Several design results, based both on engineering approach and computational fluid dynamics, are reported and discussed in the paper. | ||
| Key Words | ||
| hypersonic flow; re-entry vehicles; aerodynamics; aerothermodynamics; computational fluid dynamics | ||
| Address | ||
| Giuseppe Pezzella: Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, Aerothermodynamics Section, Italian Aerospace Research Centre, via Maiorise I-81043 Capua, Italy | ||
