A review of Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes modeling for hypersonic large cone–flares
Jimmy-John O. E. Hoste, Nicholas Gibbons, Tobias Ecker, Chiara Amato, Doyle Knight, Artemii Sattarov, Olivier Thiry, Jean-Pierre Hickey, Fahri Erinç Hizir, Tolga Köktürk, Neil Castelino, Valerio Viti, Megan A. Roldan, Steven Qiang, James G. Coder, Robert A. Baurle, Jeffery A. White
Abstract
This work assesses the status of Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes' (RANS) predictive capability for axi-symmetric hypersonic geometries. An in-depth literature review on the topic is provided including relevant developments in the field of RANS for these types of setups. Furthermore, as part of the Applied Vehicle Technology-352 on hypersonic turbulence, a code-to-code comparison on two large cone–flare geometries, experimentally studied at Calspan-University of Buffalo Research Center, has been performed to evaluate the variability in predictions for freestream Mach numbers ranging between 5 and 13 at low enthalpy conditions. The nature of the physics found in cone–flare geometries is known to be extremely challenging for RANS computational fluid dynamics codes, a fact that is confirmed in this work.