Low and high speed aerodynamic analysis of a blended wing body re-entry vehicle

Abstract

This work investigates the aerodynamic and aerothermodynamic characteristics of a multi-role crew return vehicle intended for International Space Station support missions. The vehicle aeroshape is derived by an in-house multidisciplinary design optimization procedure to safely re-enter from Low Earth Orbit, by performing a controlled unpowered landing on a conventional runway. In this work, computational fluid dynamics simulations are conducted for both subsonic and hypersonic flight regimes. These numerical analyses aim to assess the aerodynamic performance of the vehicle during the landing, and to evaluate the thermal load experienced by the configuration during the hypersonic phase of the re-entry. The results obtained under the low speed conditions are discussed with a particular focus on the vortex lift and vortex breakdown phenomena, which play a key role in the vehicle aerodynamic behavior during the landing phase. Regarding the hypersonic speed regime, the study examines the thermal loads experienced by the vehicle surface, along specific points of the reentry trajectory, verifying compliance with the thermal constraints imposed in the optimization procedure.