Flow Simulation of Atmospheric Re-entry Vehicle at Varying Mach Number and Angle of Attack

Abstract

Numerical simulations are always dominant over experimental investigations in the field of flow analysis as they are simple, economical and take less time. It is better to analyze hypersonic flow problems like re-entry of a space vehicle using computational simulation as it takes less time and predict highly accurate results. The present work mainly emphases on analyzing the flow behavior in the vicinity of Apollo re-entry vehicle at hypersonic speeds using computational fluid dynamics. A numerical analysis of at altered Mach number and two angles of attack (0° and 10°) was studied. Ansys Fluent was used as a CFD tool for modeling the problem. Meshing of domain along with the appropriate boundary conditions was used to analyze the effects of changing boundary conditions on aerodynamic properties. The flow domain around module geometry was made ten times the dimension of module geometry to capture the shock formation effectively. Appropriate boundary conditions along with suitable meshing were used to start the simulation. The effect of altering Mach number with angle of attack on aerodynamic properties, i.e., pressure, density, and temperature was examined using contours and comparison graphs.