CFD verification of supersonic retropropulsion for a central and peripheral configuration

Abstract

Supersonic retropropulsion (SRP) is a potential enabling technology for deceleration of high mass vehicles at Mars. 12Previous sub-scale testing, performed during the 1960s and 1970s to explore and characterize various decelerator technologies, focused on SRP configurations with a single central nozzle located along the axis of a vehicle; however, some multiple nozzle configurations were examined. Only one of these tests showed a peripheral configuration with nozzles outboard of the vehicle centerline. Recent computational efforts have been initiated to examine the capability of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to capture the complex SRP flow fields. This study assesses the accuracy of a CFD tool over a range of thrust conditions for both a central and peripheral configuration. Included is a discussion of the agreement between the CFD simulations and available wind tunnel data as well as a discussion of computational impacts on SRP simulation.

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