Comparison of characteristics and shock capturing methods with application to the space shuttle vehicle.

A critical appraisal is presented of a method-of-characteristics (MOC) and a shock-capturing technique (SCT) for calculating three-dimensional supersonic flow. Detailed comparisons are made for pointed and blunt-nosed bodies with a thick delta wing at angles of attack from 5 to 15 deg. The results show excellent agreement between the methods and with experiment. It is established that the SCT code yields accurate shock locations and jump conditions. The SCT code typically requires about three times as many mesh points as the MOC code in order to resolve the bow shock, but the total computation time is about the same. On a point for point basis, the SCT code is about four times faster than the MOC code.