Abstract:

Considering high temperature air chemical reactions, gas molecules vibrational excitation, non-equilibrium effects in the flow and the catalytic effect on the vehicle surface, the numerical simulation method and the corresponding computational codes are developed for the aero-thermal environment of the thermo-chemical non-equilibrium flow by solving 3-D thermochemical non-equilibrium Navier-Stokes equations and the mass and energy balance on the surface of the vehicle. The numerical results of the typical example are inconsistent well with the foreign reference data. On this basis, the influence of the local catalytic property distinction is studied for the aero-thermal environment of a hypersonic vehicle with the heat flux sensor under different conditions. These results show that the local catalytic property distinction could obviously lead to the jump heat flux. In some cases, when the local catalytic property distinction is larger, the heat flux is far higher than the result under the full catalytic surface condition of the whole vehicle surface. In the conditions of this paper, it is found that the lower the flight altitude and the greater the Mach number is, the more obvious the influence caused by the catalytic property distinction is. The influence degree is also relevant to the flight attack angle and the surface temperature. Under the similar conditions, the influence degree is more obvious when the surface temperature is higher.

Key words: Heat flux sensor, Aero thermal environment, High temperature gas effect, Catalytic effect, Numerical simulation