Journal of Aeronautics & Aerospace Engineering
Open Access

Abstract

Drag Reduction Optimization for Hypersonic Blunt Body with Aerospikes

Wan T and Liu CM

Pressure drag and aeroheating stirred by the shock wave is the main challenge of hypersonic flight, and blunt body is always the principle configuration at hypersonic flow regime for heat distribution, but it would induce substantial drag. Therefore, both aerospikes and aerodisks can be efficiently utilized as a mean for drag reduction. In this work, we investigate the effect of different geometric shapes of aerospikes with various disk gap widths on drag reduction. Accordingly, a series of numerical simulation work was implemented to find the behaviour as to hypersonic flow over aerospiked blunt bodies. Moreover, the drag reduction efficiency of spiked blunt bodies would be optimized via the 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. Hence, the performance of drag diminution will depend on the design parameters such as main body configurations, aerospike length, and tip geometric shapes.