COMPARISON OF HYPERSONIC EXPERIMENTS AND PNS PREDICTIONS .1. AEROTHERMODYNAMICS

A parabolized Navier-Stokes (PNS) scheme has been developed to study perfect-gas and equilibrium-air hypersonic flows around three-dimensional configurations. This numerical scheme is unconditionally time-like in the subsonic as well as the supersonic flow regions and does not require any sublayer approximation. This three-dimensional PNS scheme has been used to predict hypersonic flowfields over various blunt conical configurations under either flight or wind-tunnel conditions. The test cases cover a Mach number range of 6.9-20 and an angle-of-attack range from zero to 27 deg. The resulting predictions of wall heat-transfer rate are compared with flight or experimental wind-tunnel data and are found to be in excellent agreement under laminar and fully turbulent conditions. The predictions of the transition model of Dhawan-Narasimha, however, significantly differ from the observed flight data. Numerical results for large angle-of-attack conditions show that accurate modeling of the leeward crossflow separated region is essential for accurately predicting the associated leeward wall heating rates.