Improved Approximate Method for Computing Convective Heating on Hypersonic Vehicles

This paper extends a previous modified axisymmetric analog method to predict heating rates on hypersonic vehicles in conjunction with inviscid computational fluid dynamic (CFD) codes which can provide more accurate inviscid solutions and are suited for complex configurations. The major problem is the heating anomalies encountered in the stagnation region, as the quality of the heating solution is very sensitive to the quality of the inviscid solution in the high-gradient stagnation region. To overcome this problem, a hybrid approach is developed to eliminate noise in the inviscid solution in the near-stagnation region by recalculating a noise-free inviscid solution in that region using an engineering method. As a result, there is no need to spend much effort to compute a high-quality inviscid solution in the near-stagnation region when solving the inviscid solution using an inviscid CFD code, thus significantly reducing run times. The proposed method is applied to several typical hypersonic vehicles and compared with existing approaches to validate its effectiveness. The results show that the proposed method can predict surface heating rates on complex configurations with reasonable accuracy but requires much shorter computational times.