The effect of a type 3 and type 4 shock/shock interaction on heat transfer in the stagnation region

One of the major engineering challenges in designing the National Aerospace Plane, NASP, is to overcome augmented heating on the intake cowl lip from shock/shock interactions. The shock/shock interaction arises when the bow shock from the craft's nose interferes with the bow shock from the cowl lip. Considering only the region immediately around the cowl lip, the problem geometry may be simplified as that of an oblique shock impinging on a bow shock from a circular cylinder. Edney classified six different interference patterns resulting from an oblique-shock/curved bow-shock interaction. Of these six types, type 3 and 4 are most significant in that augmented surface heat transfer may be ten to thirty times greater than the case without the shock/shock interaction. The objective was to begin to develop a mathematical model which is capable of predicting the effect of a type 3 and 4 shock/shock interaction in the stagnation region of an arbitrary 2-D body. This model must be capable of predicting the maximum surface heat flux and the surface stagnation point pressure once the outer (effectively inviscid) flowfield is given. Therefore, it must capture the unsteady physics of the impinging shear layer.