João F. A. Martos , Johan Steelant , Rafael O. Santos , Marco A. S. Minucci , Israel S. Rego , Norton D. V. Assis , Jefte S. Guimarães , Amós G. Silva , Pedro A. S. Matos , Matheus T. A. Silva, Lucas A. G. Ribeiro, and Lucas G.
DOI Number XXX-YYY-ZZZ
Conference Number HiSST 2018_550801
For various high-speed applications such as hypersonic cruise vehicles or re-usable stages for access to space, there is a growing demand to perform dedicated small-scale flight experiments. The maturity in the various disciplines and technologies has evolved quite substantially in the last decade and has grown past the inherent limitations of on-ground facilities. For the applications in mind, a high aerodynamic efficiency for cruise or gliding demands naturally for winged concepts and related control surfaces to generate respectively lift and controllability. As a low-cost solution to experimentally flight test winged concepts to their flight test conditions, the use of sounding rockets has proven to be a reliable and efficient way. However, the mass and dimensions of the flight test vehicle are often limiting factors by the launcher capability, specifically the latter due to the available volume under the fairing. Already for small span vehicles, the fairing diameter limits the overall size of the vehicle. Rather than a hammerhead fairing, a hooded fairing is proposed here allowing the wing span to cross the fairing’s periphery. Consequently, the fairing diameter accommodates the vehicle main body and the hoods cover the outer parts of the wing span exceeding the fairing diameter. This solution optimizes the internal fairing volume with a minimal impact on the overall performance. However, this comes with a higher complexity for the structural design of the fairing. An extensive experimental and numerical aerodynamics analysis has been performed for the proposed hooded fairing and is presented in this work. This aero-thermal database should provide the necessary pressure and thermal loads for a preliminary thermos-structural design of this hooded fairing.