Influence of catalytic wall on the effective radius of a blunt body geometry in a nonequilibrium hypersonic flow

The effect of the surface catalycity on the effective radius of a blunt body geometry in hypersonic flow is numerically investigated. The blunt body geometry is defined in terms of a body radius with variation in both nose radius and the corner radius. Five different types of blunt body configurations are considered, that range from a flat-faced to a complete hemisphere geometry. The chosen blunt body configurations are investigated for four flow conditions with different levels of flow enthalpy. The effective radius is obtained by comparing the stagnation heat transfer of the blunt body geometry to that of the spherical geometry. To compute the stagnation heat transfer in the given blunt body configuration, a two-dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solver with thermochemical non-equilibrium is utilized. Both non-catalytic and fully-catalytic wall boundary conditions are considered in the computation. The obtained effective radius is additionally compared with the original data provided in the literature. The results show that surface catalycity influences the effective radius for the given blunt body configuration.