COMPUTATION OF HYPERVELOCITY THREE-DIMENSIONAL REACTING FLOWS.

A hybrid computational procedure is developed to compute three-dimensional, hypersonic and chemically reacting flowfields around reentry vehicles. The medium is assumed to be a multi-component mixture of thermally perfect but calorically imperfect gases. As the governing equations are integrated between the peripheral bow shock and body surface using an implicit finite-difference scheme, stiffness in species conservation equations did not pose any difficulty. Results for two-dimensional and three dimensional flows show that chemical reactions render the bow shock close to the body.