One of the most advanced concepts of future space reusable transportation systems are two-stage vehicles whose second stage is the orbital stage. Such concepts are used in the well-known Radiance (France), Sanger (Germany), and Boeing (USA) projects, as well as some others. When the first stage is equipped with an air-breathing engine, the stages are separated for Mach numbers Moo = 6-12 at altitudes of about 30 km and, hence, at high dynamic pressures. Under these conditions, the aerodynamic interference between the stages can exert a significant effect on the safety of the separation maneuver. In the general case, supersonic flow past separating vehicles is a complex three-dimensional gas-dynamic problem. An adequate numerical simulation of such flows requires a sophisticated understanding of the physical picture of interaction of the stages. This information can be a obtained from a complete aerophysical experiment that gives both total and distributed flow characteristics over wide ranges of flow parameters and relative positions of models. Decker and Gera [1] analyzed the total aerodynamic characteristics of a two-stage model for Moo = 3 and 6 for the purpose of computing the trajectories of the separating stages. Bernot [2] reported the results for the separation of the shuttle orbital stage model from the fuel tank for Moo = 10. The characteristics of specific configurations of separate vehicles are presented in [1, 2].Brodetskii et al. [3, 4] analyzed detail pressure fields and reported a vast range of material for testing the numerical methods being developed for the calculation of two isolated bodies of revolution or for the interference of these bodies with a flat plate. The results of [3, 4] broaden our knowledge of this class of complex flows, but they are insufficient to develop adequate computational algorithms for separating winged configurations.Numerical simulation of flow past aerospace systems in the process of separation of the stages was performed in [5][6][7][8]. Mukovozov [5] developed an empirical computational technique for computing the aerodynamic characteristics of the first stage (fuel tank) and of the orbital stage ("Buran" vehicle) under their separation. The results obtained are compared with experimental data in each particular case.Numerical simulation of separation processes using two-and three-dimensional unsteady Euler and Navier-Stokes equations is described in [6][7][8]. Obviously, such numerical realizations require a careful verification by experimental data to determine regions of their applications.In the present work, we used schematized models of the first and second stages to test experimentally models of the most promising TSTO concepts of two-stage systems. In such a setting, the experimental data obtained meet most fully the requirements of tests of the models developed and of the numericalsimulation methods for typical features of flow past stages under their separation. A detailed study of distributed characteristics in combination with visualization of the in...
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