Considerations on CFD Modeling for the design of re-entry vehicles

Abstract

The paper focusses on the importance of a good geometrical representation of re-entry vehicles for hypersonic flow simulations by means of CFD. Based on investigations carried out by DLR throughout past re-entry programs, it is shown that in many cases geometrical simplifications of configurations used for CFDevaluation introduce errors in aerodynamic and aerothermodynamic quanitites comparable or even higher than those arising from numerical accuracy or lack of physical modeling of the respective code. Since it is very often not possible to upgrade an already existing configuration due to layout incompatibilities of the grid, a good practice is to include as many details as possible in the initial grid design.