Investigation of Unsteady Loads due to Turbulent Supersonic Wake Flow

The modelling of unsteady side loads induced by the interaction of flow separation in the wake of hypersonic re-entry vehicles play an important role for the design of such systems. The simulation of these phenomena is one of the main challenges during decent. To investigate the turbulent wake flow, basic studies of generic configurations and the applicability of advanced turbulence modelling are necessary. For this reason validations of Detached Eddy Simulation for an axisymmetric supersonic cylinder configuration at M=2.4 are carried out to earn experience for unsteady simulations of re-entry vehicles. For this case different variations of hybrid RANS-LES methods like DES are tested by using the hybrid structured/ unstructured DLR-τ-code on hexahedral and tetrahedral grids. As a practical test case a cylindrical re-entry capsule at a hypersonic Mach number of M=5.1 under free-flight conditions was investigated.