A review of Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes modeling for hypersonic large cone-flares

Abstract

This work assesses the status of Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes' (RANS) predictive capability for axi-symmetric hypersonic geometries. An in-depth literature review on the topic is provided including relevant developments in the field of RANS for these types of setups. Furthermore, as part of the Applied Vehicle Technology-352 on hypersonic turbulence, a code-to-code comparison on two large cone-flare geometries, experimentally studied at Calspan-University of Buffalo Research Center, has been performed to evaluate the variability in predictions for freestream Mach numbers ranging between 5 and 13 at low enthalpy conditions. The nature of the physics found in cone-flare geometries is known to be extremely challenging for RANS computational fluid dynamics codes, a fact that is confirmed in this work.