Planetary Probe — Numerical Rebuilding Report

Abstract

This document describes the numerical rebuilding of the wind tunnel testing per-formed in DLR H2K facility performed in the frame of the Planetary Probe Standard Model Testing project. Two different flow conditions investigated experimentally in H2K under 0°, 6° and 12° angle of attack have been simulated employing the DLR CFD code TAU in order to determine the prediction accuracy of the rear cover heat-ing results. For these runs the steady state solver with local time stepping was em-ployed. In this case the time step for each volume cell is determined based on the local characteristic time and user defined CFL number. Hence, the steady state solv-er is not time accurate. One of the experimental conditions was simulated time re-solved employing the dual time-stepping scheme implemented in TAU with second order accuracy in time. Two initial grids have been used in order to resolve the boundary layer and the sur-face conditions properly. All grids were adapted several times to obtain grid con-verged results. None of the stationary simulations assuming laminar flow converged in the base flow region. This indicates that the wake flow for all of the experimental conditions was instationary. However, the flow cases with angle of attack show only small variations of rear cover heat flux such that a time resolved computation under angle of attack does not seem necessary. With turbulence model applied the flow becomes stationary.