Abstract:
Hypersonic flows involve high-enthalpy free-stream conditions. As a result, high temperature effects, which include internal energy excitations, energy relaxations, and chemical reactions, become important. Taking into account these high temperature effects makes it difficult and time consuming to calculate the flow field of a hypersonic flow. Fortunately, for the preliminary/conceptual design of hypersonic vehicles that are generally slender bodies, one can neglect the transport terms (mass, momentum, and energy). Hence, an approximate self-similar solution of the hypersonic flow field might be obtained by solving the inviscid governing equations. The goal of this research is to develop a reliable and efficient tool that drastically reduces the computational time for the approximate calculation of a hypersonic flow field using hypersonic small disturbance theory. A MATLAB code has been developed and tested that is capable of calculating hypersonic flows under perfect gas and diatomic dissociating gas approximations. Hypersonic flows on a circular cone, a plane wedge, and power-law shock bodies are firstly calculated based on perfect gas approximations. Flow characteristics of the cone and wedge results agree well with the oblique shock theory solutions. Hypersonic flows on power-law shock bodies are then calculated based on diatomic dissociating gas approximations. The results agree well with those in the literature. These calculations for the perfect gas and diatomic dissociating gas models shed light on the further development of small disturbance theory for more complex hypersonic flows.
