CFD Validation for Hypersonic Flight: Real Gas Flows

The aerodynamics of future hypersonic air-breathing vehicles will be greatly affected by high-enthalpy or “real gas” effects. It is the purpose of a recent NATO Research and Technology Organization study to assess the readiness of computational fluid dynamics to simulate high-enthalpy flows. This paper summarizes the results of this effort through the discussion of four test cases: a transverse cylinder, shock-shock interactions, blunt double-cones, and a large blunt cone-flare. The contributed CFD results are capable of capturing the main features of these flows, but quantitative comparisons are probably not sufficiently accurate for vehicle design. The study also shows that there are too few reliable high-enthalpy datasets to validate CFD codes.