Development of a data fusion framework for the aerodynamic analysis of launchers

Abstract

During the launching vehicles design and their optimization process, the implementing of aerodynamic characteristics (AC) database is quite important. Accuracy of such database determines quality of the pre-flight simulation, trajectory and even the whole design direction. However, the database building process is one of the most challenging steps. For most launchers, the flight envelopes cover a wide range of Mach number and Reynolds number. Traditionally, two basic practices are mostly adopted to carry out this kind of job, the experimental-based wind tunnel test (WTT) and the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation. However, both methods have their own weaknesses, either being economically or computationally expensive. These disadvantages disenable them to be the best routines. There is another kind of technique to achieve the AC database, the industrial semi-empirical computer programs, such as DATCOM from U.S. Air Force and Aeroprediction from U.S. Naval Surface Warfare Center. For scenarios where WTT is not applicable, the computational intensity of CFD can be reduced by the combination of CFD and industrial semi-empirical methods. In this project, such approach is proposed to develop the aerodynamic database for launchers, in an efficient and accurate way. The basic idea is to apply the Co-Kriging-based data fusion algorithm on CFD data and estimation results. Generally, the results from semi-empirical methods tend to have low fidelity. By performing the data fusion, the accuracy of low fidelity estimation data (from DATCOM) can be improved significantly by adding a small sum of expensive data (from CFD).