Spike Effects on Drag Reduction for Hypersonic Lifting Body

A high lift-to-drag ratio is considered crucial for high-altitude and long-endurance hypersonic vehicles. One of the simplest and most useful methods is to install an aerospike in front of the vehicle’s nose. In this paper, the flight aerodynamic characteristics are investigated by simulating and comparing the lifting body with or without the aerospikes at Ma=8. The flowfields around aerospikes using different spike lengths and a hemispherical disk along with the lifting body are analyzed. The results of aerodynamic characteristics indicate that L/D=2 is the best ratio of the spike length to the nose diameter. By comparing with the baseline model, the maximum drag reduction of the nose’s part is 49.3% at α=8  deg using a hemispherical disk. In addition, three shapes of aerospike disks are compared to search for the best disk for hypersonic drag reduction. The best drag reduction is found for the double flat-faced disk aerospike, which gives a pressure drag reduction of 60.5% of the nose’s part at α=8  deg. Furthermore, when the flight angle of attack increases, the drag increases significantly. Employing a certain installation angle is shown to effectively improve the drag reduction around the angle of attack and results in improving the lift-to-drag ratio. At the end, the lift-to-drag ratio of the final optimized design is 9.1% better than that of the baseline model. The pressure center is moved forward by 1.6%, barely influencing the vertical static stability of the vehicle.