Verification and Validation Studies for Laminar Hypersonic Flow Over a Blunted Cone and a Flat Plate

In this paper, verification and validation analysis for laminar hypersonic flow fields is presented. The simulations include a Mach 8 flow of calorically perfect gas over a spherically blunted cone and a Mach 14 flow over a flat plate. Numerical results were obtained using the finite volume method on structured grids. The verification of the numerical solutions was performed by calculating the Grid Convergence Index (GCI) for both test cases. A set of three different grids is used to calculate the discretization uncertainty, where each grid was generated by doubling the number of cells in each direction of the coarser grid. The value of GCI allows calculating the observed order of accuracy of the numerical method for local values of surface pressure at various points and the net drag force for the blunted cone case and for the local heat transfer coefficient for the flat plate case. The error band was observed to be 2.4% for the surface pressure in the blunted cone problem and 0.5% for the heat transfer coefficient in the flat plate problem. Finally the numerical results were validated with experimental data using the local surface pressure measurements for the hypersonic cone and the local heat transfer coefficient measurements for the hypersonic flat plate.