The Challenge of Modeling High Speed Flows

Abstract

Current and expected developments in space transportation have led to growing interest in new space vehicles. These new vehicles require essential improvements over current vehicles in order to ensure economic viability and to fullfill mission and safety constraints. The size and complexity of this problem has led to growing importance of numerical methods for design and optimization involving all disciplines as well as the optimal use of all technical potentialities is necessary. The material presented here reviews the growth and advances achieved at DLR in the last years. The Status of the physical modeling, code development issues such as algorithms, grid generation and validation strategy is provided. Viscous, high speed unsteady flows are still restricted to simple problems due to a strong demand in Computer resources. The short coming to obtain adequate data for code validation in high speed flow problems is discussed. It tums out that little progress has been realized in numerical modeling since past major difficulties to obtain reliable experimental data in the high enthalpy flow environments still remain. On the other side, CFD based multidisciplinary analysis is emerging as a key discipline in aerospace design. Supported by a continuous, almost linear, grows in computer capacity and performance, this new procedure to conduct configuration analysis is paying off its way. A number of selected applications of multidisciplinary problems with complex physics are presented.