Drag and Heat Reduction for Blunt Bodies in Hypersonic Flows using a Novel Double Aerodisk

High speed aerodynamic drag and heating are the two major causes of concern in fly missions of hypersonic vehicles. For such flows the installation of an aerospike in front of the vehicle's nose has been an effective solution for reducing wave drag and thermal loads over the vehicle's body for years. In this study, a novel design of the blunt nose attached with double-aerospike for hypersonic vehicles is proposed which reduces both the drag and the aerodynamic heating. The fluid and thermal fields around the double-aerospike at L/D=2 and various angles-of-attack (AOA) are investigated numerically using ANSYS-Fluent at a Mach number of 6. The results show a good agreement with the available experimental data of a flat-faced attached single aerospike and that the novel double aerospike significantly reduces the drag coefficient by 15.55% and 29.23% at 5º and 8º angles-of-attack, respectively, compared to the single spiked configuration. The novel double aerospike reduces the aerodynamic heating for all the studied angles of attack (α=0º, 5º & 8º). The modified configuration also shows a reduction in the temperature difference between the upper and lower frontal areas of the blunt body by 96.25% at 8º AOA compared to the single spike model.