Investigations of Supersonic Flow Around a Long Axisymmetric Body

In this work, a supersonic turbulent flow over a long axisymmetric body was investigated, both experimentally and computationally. The experimental study consisted of a series of wind tunnel tests for the flow over an ogive-cylinder body at a Mach number of 1.6 and at a Reynolds number of 8 x 106, at angles of attack between -2 and 6 degrees. It included the surface static pressure and the boundary layer profile measurements. Further, the flow around the model was visualized using a Schlieren technique. All tests were conducted in the trisonic wind tunnel of the Qadr Research Center (QRC). Also, the same flow at zero angle of attack was computationally simulated using a multi-block grid (with patched method around the block interfaces) to solve the thin layer Navier-Stokes (TLNS) equations. The numerical scheme used was implicit Beam and Warming central differencing, while a Baldwin-Lomax turbulence model was used to close the Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations. The static surface pressure results show that the circumferential pressure at different nose sections varies significantly with angle of attack (in contrast to the circumferential pressure signatures along the cylindrical part of the body), while the total pressure measurements in the boundary layer vary significantly both radially and longitudinally. Two belts with various leading edge angles were installed at different locations along the cylindrical portion of the model. The computational results obtained were compared with some experimental ones (found by these authors), showing considerably close agreements.