Computational methods for shock waves in three-dimensional supersonic flow

A central artificial-viscosity and an upwind-biased difference method are contrived to solve the Euler equations for flowfields over typical spacecrafts. The spatial discretization is based on either nodal or cell-vertex formulation in the domain extending from free stream to the end of the vehicle. The outer boundary is treated as a bow shock in the first method but is placed in the free stream in the second, which captures both bow and internal shocks using an approximate Riemann solver based on high-order extrapolation to the cell face. These methods were tested for the Shuttle and Hermes orbiters at wind-tunnel conditions and angles of attack ranging from 0 to 60 deg. The artificial-viscosity method incorporated with a shock-fitting procedure shows smeared crossflow and wing-shock positions and required 15 percent more CPU per node than the upwind method. Greater flexibility and robustness is demonstrated by the latter on a fixed grid for all cases considered.