The present study is carried out to numerically investigate the supersonic flow field around a missile afterbody with an exhausting underexpanded jet flow which is very important to the performance and stability characteristics of the missile.
The initial condition of the flow field at the nozzle outlet is supplied by solving the internal nozzle flow by using the general computer program, VNAP, for compressible flows. The compressible, Reynolds averaged, Navier Stokes equations are solved using the Beam-Warming implicit scheme with a Baldwin-Lomax type turbulence model.
The computational results such as the macroscopic flow field structure, streamwise static pressure and sonic line variation are compared with Seiner's data. The results reveal that the present approach yields only qualitative agreement with the experiment and that more general turbulence models are required to obtain better quantitative predictions about the sonic line and static pressure variations along the downstream distance.
