Unsteady Simulations of Missile Exhaust Plume Interactions

Hughson, M., & Luke, E. (2008). Unsteady Simulations of Missile Exhaust Plume Interactions. 26th AIAA Applied Aerodynamics Conference, Honolulu, Hawaii: American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA).

This paper describes an unsteady computational fluid dynamics (CFD) study of the development and interaction of a missile exhaust plume flowfield in the vicinity of a generic blockhouse structure. A two-species model comprised of air and the rocket motor exhaust gas was used with Loci/CHEM – a Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) unstructured flow solver with a finite-rate chemistry capability – and the study was conducted at the Computational Simulation and Design Center (SimCenter) of the High Performance Computing Collaboratory (HPC2) at Mississippi State University. A MILES [Monotone Integrated Large Eddy Simulation (LES)] approach, two explicit turbulence models - Menter’s Shear Stress Transport k-ω/k-ε model and Wilcox’s 1998 k-ω model – and a hybrid RANS/LES were used, as well as using 10 and 100 mph free stream wind speeds. The CFD results elucidate the flow field development and interactions with the blockhouse structure.