Washington: National Aeronautics and Space Administration.).
Regarding the Space Shuttle, a double-delta wing configuration was adopted to optimize the hypersonic flight as well as to obtain a good lift-to-drag ratio for landing ( Launius and Jenkins 2012 Launius RD, Jenkins DR (2012) Coming home: reentry and recovery from space. Its reusable nature dictates that it should be able to shield the underlying structure from excessive temperatures during hypersonic flight and still have good aerodynamic performance at the landing speed. The results show that the peak heat flux of the optimal airfoil during hypersonic flight is reduced by 7.61% at the stagnation point, while the lift-to-drag remains almost unchanged under landing condition.Īirfoil optimization Aerodynamic heating Hicks-Henne type function Airfoil parameterization Surrogate modelĪerospace planes (ASP) encounter severe aerodynamic heating during the hypersonic phase of atmospheric re-entry. NACA 0012 is taken as the baseline airfoil for case study. Afterwards, the previously mentioned surrogate model is employed in combination with the Multi-Island Genetic Algorithm to perform the optimization procedure. Design of Experiment technique is utilized to establish the surrogate model. Computational Fluid Dynamics models at hypersonic as well as landing conditions are then established and discussed. First, airfoil profile is parametrically described to be more advantageous during the optimization process, and the Hicks-Henne type function is improved considering its application on the airfoil leading edge. Lift-to-drag ratio at landing condition is taken as a constraint to ensure the landing aerodynamic performance.
Aiming to mitigate the aerodynamic heating during hypersonic re-entry, the aerothermodynamic optimization of aerospace plane airfoil leading edge is conducted.