The purpose of this paper is to present an engineering inviscid‐boundary layer method for the calculation of convective heating rates on three‐dimensional non‐axisymmetric geometries at angle of attack.
Based on the axisymmetric analog, convective heating rates are calculated along the surface streamlines which are determined using the inviscid properties calculated on an unstructured grid.
Since the method is capable of using inviscid properties calculated on an unstructured grid, it is applicable to a variety of configurations and it requires much less computational effort than a Navier‐Stokes code. The results of the present method are evaluated on different wing body configurations in laminar and turbulent hypersonic equilibrium flows. In comparison to experimental data, the present results are found to be fairly accurate in the windward and leeward regions.
With this approach, heating rates can be predicted on general three‐dimensional configurations at hypersonic speeds in an accurate and fast scheme.
In order to calculate the heating rates at any specific point on the surface, a technique is developed to calculate the inviscid surface streamlines in a backward manner using the inviscid velocity components. The metric coefficients are also calculated using a new simple technique.
