Verification and Validation of a Numerical Analysis for a Reentry Space Shuttle Vehicle

The Air Force is currently is interested in reusable launch vehicles (RLV) to better understand their flight environment. This will require the use of high fidelity CFD solutions to capture the flow features that are of interest for resolving design issues. To help meet these requirements, AFRL is looking into different CFD solvers. In this work, preliminary evaluation of the AVUS Equilibrium Air solver developed by Wright State University (AFRL/RBAC) for RLVs will be presented. Flight data from the Space Shuttle was used as a basis for this preliminary study. The flight data was for a Mach 18 flow at ~65 km in the reentry trajectory. Pressure coefficients from the flight are used as a comparison. The CFD results were also compared to a non-equilibrium CFD solver, US3D (University of Minnesota). The Shuttle trajectory is known to be in-between the equilibrium and nonequilibrium regime and a comparison will give understanding to the applicability of an equilibrium solver to Shuttle type trajectories.