A rapid approach to convective aeroheating prediction of hypersonic vehicles

A rapid approach to hypersonic aeroheating predictions in the stagnation region and downstream is developed in the present paper.The engineering method is used to calculate inviscid hypersonic flowfields to reduce time cost,and a combination of the mass flow balance technique and the axisymmetric analog is proposed to account for the entropy swallowing effects.A three-dimensional linear method is derived to fit the vehicle surface flowfields.Then a new axisymmetric analog method based on linear flowfields and linear surface equations is developed,with the complexity and computational cost reduced dramatically.In the stagnation region,an implicit surface fitting is introduced to approximate the primary curvatures and a robust aeroheating prediction method is constructed.The proposed approach is verified on a variety of configurations including spherically blunted cone,double ellipsoid and aerospace vehicle.Numerical results indicate the followings：1）The approach predicts aeroheating in about one second and the results agree well with CFD simulations and wind-tunnel measurements;2）with the help of entropy correction,the precision is further improved in the streamline diverging regions on the vehicle surface,while little improvement is found after entropy correction in the regions where the streamlines do not diverge.