Scope and Content of the Book

The aerodynamic and the aerothermodynamic design of flight vehicles have undergone large changes regarding the tools used in the design processes. Dis­crete numerical methods of aerothermodynamics now find their place already in the early vehicle definition phases. This is a welcome development from the viewpoint of vehicle design, because only with their use the necessary completeness and accuracy of design data can be attained. However, as will be shown and discussed in this book, computational simulation still suffers, like that with other analytical methods, and of course also ground-facility simulation, under the insufficient representation of real-gas and of turbulence phenomena. This is a shortcoming, which in the long run has to be overcome.

It remains the problem that computational simulation gives results on a high abstraction level. This is similar with the application of, for instance, computational methods in structural design. The user of numerical simu­lation methods therefore must have very good basic knowledge of both the phenomena he wishes to describe and their significance for the design problem at hand.

Therefore this book has the aim to foster:

— the understanding of their qualitative dependence on flight parameters, vehicle geometry, etc.,

— and their quantitative description.

As a consequence of this the classical approximate methods, and also the modern discrete numerical methods, in general will not be discussed in detail. The reader is referred either to the original literature, or to hypersonic mono­graphs, which introduce to their basics in some detail, for instance [27, 28]. However, approximate methods, and very simple analytical considerations will be presented and employed where possible to give basic insights and to show basic trends.

The book has three introductory chapters. On Chapter 1, the introduc­tion, follows Chapter 2, treating the flight environment, which in the frame of this book predominantly is the Earth atmosphere below approximately 100 km altitude. Chapter 3 is devoted to the discussion of the thermal radi­ation cooling of outer vehicle surfaces. This cooling is a basic condition for hypersonic flight of all kinds.

Chapters 4 to 9 are devoted to the classical topics of aerothermodynam – ics. Chapter 4 gives the basic mathematical formulations regarding transport of mass, momentum and energy. Emphasis is put on the presentation of sim­ilarity parameters, and of the boundary conditions at the vehicle surface. Chapters 5 and 6 then treat the topics real-gas and inviscid aerothermody – namic phenomena.

The topics attached high-speed viscous flow and laminar-turbulent transi­tion and turbulence—being very important in view of CAV’s and ARV’s—are presented in Chapters 7 and 8. Strong-interaction phenomena are discussed in Chapter 9.

Remains the topic of thermal surface effects. Examples of thermal surface effects are given in several of the chapters. Chapter 10 then is dedicated to discussions of further examples of, however, only viscous thermal surface effects. In view of CAV and ARV design these being the more important effects.

A solution guide and solutions of the problems posed at the ends of most of the chapters are given in Chapter 11.

In Appendix A we collect the governing equations of hypersonic flow in general coordinates. The book closes with constants, functions etc. (Appendix B), symbols and acronyms (Appendix C), permissions, and the author and the subject index.

The discussion of computational and ground-facility simulation means, to which a chapter was devoted in the first edition of this book, has been deleted. The author believes that now, nearly after ten years of the first edition, this of course still very important topic is covered enough with and in other publications, see, e. g., also [5, 21].

Also deleted was the small chapter on the Rankine-Hugoniot-Prandtl – Meyer (RHPM)-flyer, which was introduced in the first edition as a very simple approximation of hypersonic flight vehicles. The RHPM-flyer is based on shock-expansion theory and very easy to employ. Because cheap computer power now is available, other approximation