Investigation of computational flow field over a re-entry capsule at high speed

• Main Authors: Rathnavel S., Balaji K., Kumar P.S. Prem, Sathesh Raja N., Sankaran K. Vijaya
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: University of Belgrade - Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Belgrade 2020-01-01
• Series: FME Transactions
• Subjects: computational fluid dynamics; re-entry vehicle; shock wave disturbance; turbulent flow
• Online Access: https://scindeks-clanci.ceon.rs/data/pdf/1451-2092/2020/1451-20922003551R.pdf

Manned space programme has become inevitable in the modern world. One important aspect in such endeavors is getting the crew back to home safe and sound. Re-entry capsules are widely used for bringing back astronauts back to the Earth. The re-entry mission is a very crucial one, with speeds up to 30 times than that of sound and temperatures hot enough to ionize air. The study and design of a re-entry capsule has to be done with utmost concern over the life of returning astronauts. In this paper, simulations carried out over a re-entry vehicle for various free-stream conditions such as subsonic, supersonic and hypersonic flow regimes. Results were obtained by solving compressible Navier-Stokes equation with k-omega turbulent model. Simulations were carried out for various inlet conditions corresponding to an altitude of a re-entry vehicle by using CFD code SU2. The geometrical parameters of a re-entry vehicle such as spherical nose radius and cone angle were varied and the effects of the aerodynamic phenomena such as shock wave, flow separation and wake formation over a downstream of a module were studied. In this paper, the results pertaining to the pressure distribution, the Mach contour and temperature over a module is presented.