Impact of turbulence modelling on external supersonic flow field simulations in rocket aerodynamics

This paper contains a three-dimensional study on the influence of different turbulence models for external supersonic flow field simulations, aiming at reaching the best accuracy in rocket aerodynamics. A well-studied test case -a slender body- has been used for the validation process, which involves the major turbulence models available. The SST k–ω model has been selected as the most suitable one for this kind of flows. Good agreements between numerical, theoretical and experimental results are obtained, which are used to set up some guidelines regarding the configuration of Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) supersonic models for these flight regimes.