15 - Guest lectures
THE TREATMENT OF NON-IDEAL SURFACE TOPOLOGIES RELATED TO HIGH-SPEED VEHICLE DESIGN
J. Merrifield, Fluid Gravity Engr Ltd., United Kingdom
Robust high speed vehicle design requires real-world non-ideal surface topologies to be accounted for at appropriate fidelity throughout the design process. This is required to avoid late-phase design alteration or costly remedial action. Here "non-ideal" refers to surfaces that may roughen due to ablation as well as steps, gaps and other geometry singularities that necessarily arise due to joints or moving / separable components. rnThese topologies are difficult to analysis with industrially accessible numerical methods, have a broad range of possible configurations and are non-trivial to investigate experimentally in the high-speed regime. Given these uncertainties, accounting for non-ideal surface topologies throughout the various stages of design, whilst keeping a balanced margin policy, represents a particular challenge. rnThis presentation explores some combined experimental-numerical approaches that can be used to address these challenges in attempt to mitigate associated design risks.