Keywords: World Land Speed Record, aerodynamic design, supersonic flow, unstructured mesh, parallelisation.

The World Land Speed Record was first set in 1898 and has since been broken around sixty times. The current supersonic Record of 763~mph was set in 1997 by Thrust SSC. A significant feature of the Thrust SSC Project was the manner in which computational fluid dynamics (CFD) was applied at Swansea to assist the aerodynamic design process [1,2]. The Bloodhound SSC Project was announced in 2008 and involves the design and construction of a vehicle which will attempt to take the World Land Speed Record to 1,000 mph. It has been decided that CFD will again be employed to guide the aerodynamic design of the vehicle.

A computational procedure for simulating turbulent high speed compressible flows will be outlined. The Favre averaged equations are considered in integral form and the numerical solution is obtained via a finite volume discretisation on hybrid unstructured meshes. The stabilised equation system is solved by explicit iteration and the computational performance is enhanced by the use of an agglomerated multigrid procedure and parallelisation [3].

This approach has been applied to Bloodhound SSC and the influence of the CFD simulations on the aerodynamic design will be described. As the project proceeds, the quality of the computed performance predictions will be critically analysed, using the data generated by the vehicle during actual runs.

[1]

R. Noble, "Thrust", Transworld, London, 1998.

[2]

"The Story of ThrustSSC", Corgi Books, London, 1998.

[3]

K.A. Sørensen, O. Hassan, K. Morgan, N.P. Weatherill, "A multigrid acclerated hybrid unstructured mesh method for 3D compressible turbulent flow", Computational Mechanics, 31, 101-114, 2003. doi:10.1007/s00466-002-0397-9

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