COMPARISON OF HYPERSONIC EXPERIMENTS AND PNS PREDICTIONS .2. AERODYNAMICS

Predictions and comparisons with wind-tunnel data are presented for a new three-dimensional parabolized Navier-Stokes (PNS) scheme for predicting perfect-gas and equilibrium-air hypersonic flows around complex three-dimensional configurations. In addition to a predictor-corrector solution and a crossflow-coupled implicit shock fitting, this three-dimensional PNS scheme also involves a new fast and efficient elliptic grid-generation scheme for accurately modeling three-dimensional configurations. The test cases considered cover a Mach number range of 10-20 and an angle-of-attack range of 0-14 deg. The resulting predictions of wall-pressure distributions and force and moment data are compared with available wind-tunnel data and are found to be in excellent agreement under laminar and fully turbulent conditions. Results also show that the new elliptic grid-generation scheme requires only 10-15% more computing time then the simple cylindrical grid-generation scheme; however, it is capable of treating a much wider range of simple-to-complex three-dimensional configurations.