Degree Type

Dissertation

Date of Award

1990

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

Mechanical Engineering

First Advisor

Richard H. Pletcher

Abstract

Numerical simulations using the thin-layer Navier-Stokes equations and chimera (overset) grid approach were carried out for flows around the integrated space shuttle vehicle over a range of Mach numbers. Body-conforming grids were used for all the component grids. Testcases include a three-component overset grid--the external tank (ET), the solid rocket booster (SRB) and the orbiter (ORB), and a five-component overset grid--the ET, SRB, ORB, forward and aft attach hardware, configurations. The results were compared with the wind tunnel and flight data;In addition, a Poisson solution procedure (a special case of the vorticity-velocity formulation) using primitive variables was developed to solve three-dimensional, irrotational, inviscid flows for single as well as overset grids. The solutions were validated by comparisons with other analytical or numerical solutions, and/or experimental results for various geometries. The Poisson solution was also used as an initial guess for the thin-layer Navier-Stokes solution procedure to improve the efficiency of the numerical flow simulations. It was found that this approach resulted in roughly a 30% CPU time savings as compared with the procedure solving the thin-layer Navier-Stokes equations from a uniform free stream flowfield.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.31274/rtd-180813-9164

Publisher

Digital Repository @ Iowa State University, http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/

Copyright Owner

Ing-Tsau Chiu

Language

en

Proquest ID

AAI9101340

File Format

application/pdf

File Size

154 pages

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