Hypersonic Blunt Body Thermophysics Using a Unified Kinetic/Continuum Solver

The Unified Flow Solver (UFS) is used to simulate a Mach 10 flow of argon about a 2D cylinder at densities corresponding to Kn1 = 0.01 and Kn1 = 0.25. UFS is a hybrid kinetic/continuum solver implementing automatic domain decomposition and mesh refinement. A BGK model is used for the kinetic solver, coupled with an Euler solver. Solution results are compared to similar results from DSMC. Good agreement is obtained for surface pressure and shear stress (with total drag predictions for UFS being within 2% of those for DSMC), surface heating is over-predicted as compared to the DSMC solutions (with UFS predicting peak heating about twice that predicted by DSMC).