COMPARISON OF GAS-DYNAMIC MODELS FOR HYPERSONIC FLOW PAST BODIES

Various gas-dynamic models for describing chemically non-equilibrium flows are compared using the example of the steady flow past the blunt nose of the ''Buran'' [1] and ''Space Shuttle'' vehicles during their descent from orbit. Models of locally self-similar approximations of the Navier-Stokes equations [2], of a chemically equilibrium and non-equilibrium complete viscous shock layer (CVSL) 13] and a model of a thin viscous shock layer (TVSL) [4] are considered. In all the models the occurrence of physicochemical processes was taken into account in the same way using fixed values of the constants for the gas-phase chemical reactions (their effect has been considered in [51). Good agreement between the results of calculations of the heat flux at the critical point is found. Chemically non-equilibrium flows have been considered earlier using the approximate Navier-Stokes equations [6], within the framework of a TVSL [71 and a CVSL [8, 9] (for more detail, see the review [10]). The TVSL and CVSL models were compared in [11] in the case of flows of a uniform gas.