Heat transfer to proximal cylinders in hypersonic flow

Abstract

Uncontrolled atmospheric entry of meteors, satellites, and spacecraft components often leads to their partial or complete demise. In this destructive process, driven by hypersonic ablation, reentry objects fragment, interact, and alter each other's aerothermal environment. The effect of these interactions on the heat transfer to the fragments has not been investigated, despite the heat transfer's importance in hypersonic ablation and reentry demise. This study focuses on the numerical investigation of heat transfer to proximal circular cylinders in a thermochemically frozen flow and in two dimensions. First, binary body configurations at Mach numbers 2, 4, and 8 revealed that the heat load and peak heat transfer can be augmented for either or both proximal bodies by +20% to −90% of an isolated body. Second, different clusters of five proximal bodies showed that the heat load to any given body can range from +40% to −90% of an isolated body. Moreover, the average heat load in a cluster is found to vary between +20% and −60% of an isolated body. Intuitively, clusters which are thin in the direction perpendicular to free-stream velocity and long in the direction parallel to the free-stream velocity have their cluster-averaged heat load reduced. In contrast, thick and thin clusters, in directions perpendicular and parallel to the free-stream velocity, are subject to an increased cluster-averaged heat load.