The development of an explicit thermochemical nonequilibrium algorithm and its application to compute three dimensional AFE flowfields

This study presents a three-dimensional explicit, finite-difference, shock-capturing numerical algorithm applied to viscous hypersonic flows in thermochemical nonequilibrium. The algorithm employs a two-temperature physical model. Equations governing the finite-rate chemical reactions are fully-coupled to the gas dynamic equations using a novel coupling technique. The new coupling method maintains stability in the explicit, finite-rate formulation while allowing relatively large global time steps. The code uses flux-vector accuracy. Comparisons with experimental data and other numerical computations verify the accuracy of the present method. The code is used to compute the three-dimensional flowfield over the Aeroassist Flight Experiment (AFE) vehicle at one of its trajectory points.