The problem of proximal bodies in hypersonic flow is encountered in several important situations, both natural and man-made. The present work seeks to investigate one aspect of this problem by exploring the forces experienced by a secondary body when some part of it is within the shocked region created by a primary body travelling at hypersonic speeds.An analytical methodology based on the blast wave analogy is developed and used to predict the secondary force coefficients for simple geometries in both two and three dimensions. When the secondary body is entirely inside the primary shocked region, the nature of the lateral coefficient is found to depend strongly on the relative size of the two bodies. For two spheres, the methodology predicts that the secondary body will experience an exclusively attractive lateral force if the secondary diameter is larger then one-sixth the primary diameter. The analytical results are compared with numerical simulations carried out using the AMROC software and good agreement is obtained if an appropriate normalization for the lateral displacement is used.Results from a series of experiments in the T5 hypervelocity shock tunnel are also presented and compared with perfect-gas numerical simulations, again with good agreement. In order to model this situation experimentally, a new force-measurement technique for short-duration hypersonic facilities has been developed, and results from the validation experiments are included.Finally, the analytical methodology is used to model two physical situations. First, the entry of a binary asteroid system into the Earth's atmosphere is simulated. Seciv ond, a model for a fragmenting meteoroid in a planetary atmosphere is developed, and simulations are carried out to determine whether the secondary scatter patterns in the Sikhote-Alin crater field may be attributed to aerodynamic interactions between fragments rather than to secondary fragmentation. It is found that while aerodynamic interactions lead to increased secondary crater grouping, these groups do not exhibit the typically elliptical shape that we would expect secondary fragmentation to produce.

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Visualization experiments are performed to investigate the development of instability waves within the boundary layer on a slender cone under high Mach number conditions. The experimental facility is a reflected-shock wind tunnel, allowing both low (Mach-8 flight equivalent) and high-enthalpy conditions to be simulated. Second-mode instability waves are visualized using a high-speed schlieren set-up, with pulse bursting of the light source allowing the propagation speed of the wavepackets to be unambiguously resolved. This, in combination with wavelength information derived from the images, enables the calculation of the disturbance frequencies. At the lower-enthalpy conditions, we concentrate on the late laminar and transitional regions of the flow. General characteristics are revealed through time-resolved and ensemble-averaged spectra on both smooth and porous ceramic surfaces of the cone. Analysis of the development of individual wavepackets is then performed. It is found that the wavepacket structures evolve from a ‘rope-like’ appearance to become more interwoven as the disturbance nears breakdown. The wall-normal disturbance distributions of both the fundamental and first harmonic, which initially have local maxima at the wall and near $y/{\it\delta}=0.7$–0.75, exhibit an increase in signal energy close to the boundary-layer edge during this evolution. The structure angle of the disturbances also undergoes subtle changes as the wavepacket develops prior to breakdown. Experiments are also performed at high-enthalpy ($h_{0}\approx 12~\text{MJ}~\text{kg}^{-1}$) conditions in the laminar regime, and the visualization technique is shown to be capable of resolving wavepacket propagation speeds and frequencies at such conditions. The visualizations reveal a somewhat different wall-normal distribution to the low-enthalpy case, with the disturbance energy concentrated much more towards the wall. This is attributed to the highly cooled nature of the wall at high enthalpy.

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Arrays of dielectric-barrier-discharge plasma actuators have been designed to generate spanwise travelling waves in the turbulent boundary layer for possible skin-friction drag reductions. Particle image velocimetry was used to elucidate the modifications to turbulence structures created by the plasma spanwise travelling waves. It has been observed that the plasma spanwise travelling waves amalgamated streamwise vortices, lifting low-speed fluid from the near-wall region up and around the peripheries of their cores to form wide ribbons of low-speed streamwise velocity within the viscous sublayer.