LAUSR

Abstract Huge aerodynamic drag and severe aeroheating are the inevitable challenges for hypersonic vehicles, this paper proposes a novel combined spike-aerodome and lateral jet strategy for drag reduction and thermal protection. Meanwhile, the hypersonic flow characteristics and structure thermal response are numerically investigated by an in-house code. The obtained results demonstrate that this novel strategy not only further reduces the total drag, but also provides excellent thermal protection for both the blunt body and spike rod. Then the effects of lateral jet pressure ratio, spike length and aerodome diameter on the flow properties, drag and heat reduction performance are thoroughly explored. Increasing the lateral jet pressure ratio can effectively enhance the thermal protection. Surprisingly, in a certain range, higher lateral jet pressure ratio even leads to larger pressure peak value on the blunt body. Increasing the spike length would enhance the heat transfer along the blunt body surface, and the total drag changes non-monotonically as the spike length varies. The total drag rises significantly when the aerodome diameter increases, and it can be increased by 40.1% when the aerodome diameter ratio increases from 0.15 to 0.5. Besides, increasing the aerodome diameter is beneficial to remarkably enhance thermal protection.