Computational investigations of blunt body drag-reduction spikes in hypersonic flows

Drag is an important parameter in the designing of high-speed vehicles. Such vehicles include hypervelocity projectiles, reentry modules, and hypersonic aircrafts. Therefore, there exists an active or passive technique to reduce drag due to the high pressures at nosetip region of the vehicle. Drag can be reduced by attaching a forward facing spike on the nose of the vehicle. The present study reviews and deals with the CFD analysis made on a standard blunt body to reduce aerodynamic drag due to the attachment of forward facing spikes for High-Speed vehicles. Different spike lengths have been examined to study the forebody flowfield. The investigation concludes that spikes are an effective way to reduce the aerodynamic drag due to reduced dynamic pressure on the nose caused by the separated flow on the spikes. With the accomplishment of confidence on computational data, study was extended in hypersonic Mach range with a drag prediction accuracy of ± 10%. In the present work, viscous fluid dynamics studies were performed for a complete freestream Mach number range of 5.0, 6.0, 7.0 and 8.0 for different spike lengths and zero degree angle of attack. (author)