Parametric investigation on drag reduction and thermal protection characteristics of the porous opposing jet in the hypersonic flow

Abstract The numerical study about the porous opposing jet scheme on the leading edge of a blunt body is conducted to evaluate the impact of the drag reduction and thermal protection on the head of the hypersonic vehicle. In this paper, the three-dimensional compressible Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations coupled with the SST k-ω turbulence model are used to perform the numerical simulation in the flow. The reliability of the numerical approaches is verified by comparing with the available experimental data from the published literature. The flow field characteristics of the diameter, the spacing and the number of jet orifices are compared and analyzed. The obtained results show that the porous opposing jet can play a good role in both drag reduction and thermal protection. Changing the parameters of the porous opposing jet has a great impact on the drag reduction and thermal protection of the hypersonic vehicle, and the effect on the thermal protection is more obvious than that on the drag reduction. It is found that when the number of jet orifices is odd, the influence of drag reduction and thermal protection is better than that when the number of jet orifices is even. There is an optimal parameter combination among different porous opposing jet parameters, and it can make the scheme optimally.