Optimization of air-ejected rocket/missile geometries under validated supersonic flow field simulations

This paper defines a methodology to carry out optimizations of rocket/missile geometries by means of krigingbased algorithms applied to simulations made with computational fluid dynamic (CFD) codes. The first part of the paper is focused on the validation of the open source CFD code against a well-studied 3-dimmensional test case in supersonic conditions. The impact of several turbulence models, different numerical schemes to discretize the equations and different mesh resolution levels have been analyzed demonstrating the performance of using wall functions for supersonic flow. Good agreements between numerical, theoretical and experimental results are obtained and some general guidelines are extracted. The best accuracy is obtained with SST k-omega turbulence model with meshes suitable for the use of wall functions in the boundary cells. Then, with this configuration for the simulations, an air-ejected rocket fairing is selected to apply a geometrical optimization. The selected method is kriging-based, ...