Investigation of Energy Deposition Technique for Drag Reduction at Hypersonic Speeds

Abstract

Reduction in aerodynamic heating is the major design concern for hypersonic or hypervelocity vehicles which makes typical configurations blunt nosed for this flow regime. These blunt configurations make the space flight costlier due to higher wave drag. Therefore development and optimization of drag reduction techniques is the field of investigation and research in the area of hypersonic aerodynamics. The present work focuses on the investigation of concentrated energy addition technique for drag reduction. An in-house developed high precision compressible flow solver has been employed for the computational investigation of this technique. Parametric studies are carried out to investigate the effect of strength of energy source, location of energy addition and size of energy source.