Tandem spheres in hypersonic flow

Abstract

The problem of determining the forces acting on a secondary body when it is travelling at some point within the shocked region created by a hypersonic primary body is of interest in such situations as store or stage separation, re-entry of multiple vehicles, and atmospheric meteoroid fragmentation. The current work is concerned with a special case of this problem, namely that in which both bodies are spheres and are stationary with respect to one another. We first present an approximate analytical model of the problem; subsequently, numerical simulations are described and results are compared with those from the analytical model. Finally, results are presented from a series of experiments in the T5 hypervelocity shock tunnel in which a newly-developed force-measurement technique was employed.

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