Atmospheric reentry dynamics of conic objects (Q966309)

Summary: One of the key issues in a reentry risk analysis is the calculation of the aerodynamic coefficients. This paper presents a methodology to obtain these coefficients and couple it to a code that computes re-entry trajectories considering six degrees of freedom. To evaluate the different flight conditions encountered during the natural re-entry of conical objects, the Euler Equations for gasdynamics flows are used. A new scheme TVD (Total Variation Diminishing) is incorporated to a finite volume unstructured cell-centred formulation, for application to three-dimensional Euler flows. Finally, numerical results are obtained for a conical body at different attack angles and Mach. With these results, the calculation of the trajectories during atmospheric re-entry is completed.