Simulation of different nose shapes of hypersonic vehicle to minimize both drag and heat transfer

The goal of this work is to select a nose shape among the chosen few that provide reduced drag and heat transfer during hypersonic flight. The selected shapes are bi-conic, elliptical and parabolic nose. Since, two of the major difficulties incorporated in bodies travelling at hypersonic speed are high magnitude of drag and heat transfer. Reducing them is of high importance while designing an aircraft. Developing such a shape is challenging due to their conflicting relationship with nose shape i.e. a shape reducing high amount of drag also enhances heat transfer and vice versa. So, those nose shapes are designed and analyzed by a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software. Engineering simulation software ANSYS is used to solve Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations along with k-ω SST turbulence model to analyze the three selected nose shapes at a Mach no. of 7.1 at an altitude of 10 km from sea-level. At the end of the simulation, the comparison of the results shown concluded the parabolic nose as the best performer than others.