Approximate Method for Computing Convective Heating on Hypersonic Vehicles Using Unstructured Grids

The ability to predict surface heating rates, as well as shear and pressure forces, is fundamental to the analysis and design of the thermal protection system for hypersonic vehicles. Approximate engineering codes that can be used to rapidly predict heating rates are extremely useful in the preliminary or conceptual design phase, whereas more detailed and expensive Navier–Stokes codes are generally used to provide more accurate heating rate predictions for final design. An earlier code has been used successfully in conjunction with inviscid flowfield codes computed on single-block structured grids. More recent inviscid codes have been developed that use unstructured grids, which greatly reduce grid generation time for complex configurations. A newer heating code had been used successfully with unstructured inviscid flowfield codes to compute laminar heating on general three-dimensional vehicles using unstructured grids and the heating rates over most of the vehicle have been shown to compare favorably wit...