Parametric study of nonequilibrium shock interference patterns over a fuselage-and-wing conceptual vehicle

Predicting shock/shock and shock/boundary-layer interactions in gas flows that surround high-speed vehicles is key in aerodynamic design. Under typical hypersonic conditions, these flow structures are influenced by complex nonequilibrium phenomena leading to high-temperature effects. In this work, the conceptual Bedford wing-body vehicle is studied to analyze flow patterns in shock/shock and shock/boundary-layer interactions with thermochemical nonequilibrium. A parametric computational fluid dynamics study is carried out for different hypersonic operating conditions, with respect to the freestream Mach number. Simulations are performed with the SU2-NEMO solver coupled to the Mutation++ library, which provides all the necessary thermodynamic, kinetic, and transport properties of the mixture and chemical species. The Adaptive Mesh Generation library is used for automatic anisotropic mesh adaptation. Numerical results show that increasing the freestream Mach number from 4 to 10 leads to changes in the shock layer, locations of shock impingement, and regions of boundary-layer separation. Despite these changes, the change in freestream Mach number has little impact on the overall shock interaction structures.