An improvement of the base bleed unit on base drag reduction and heat energy addition as well as mass addition

• A 2D axisymmetric Navier-Stokes equation for a multi-component reactive system is solved.
• The coupling of the internal and wake flow field with secondary combustion is calculated.
• Detailed data with combined effects of boattailing and post-combustion are obtained.
• The mechanism of heat energy addition and thermodynamics performances is investigated.

Numerical simulations are carried out to investigate the base drag and energy characteristics of a base-bleed projectile with and without containing the effect of a post-combustion process for a boattailed afterbody in a supersonic flow, and then to analyze the key factor of drag reduction and pressure decreasing of base bleed projectile. Detailed chemistry models for H2CO combustion have been incorporated into a Navier-Stokes computer code and applied to flow field simulation in the base region of a base-bleed projectile. Detailed numerical results for the flow patterns and heat energy addition as well as mass addition for different conditions are presented and compared with existing experimental data. The results shows that, the post-combustion contributes to energy addition and base drag reduction up to 78% on account of that the heat energy released from the post-combustion using fuel-rich reaction products as the fuel in the wake region is much higher than for the corresponding cold bleed and hot bleed cases. In addition, the temperature distribution regularities are changed under post-combustion effect, presenting that the peak appears in a couple of recirculation regions. The fuel-rich bleed gas flows into the shear layer along the crack between these two recirculation regions and then those can readily burn when mixing with the freestream, thus causing component changes of H2 and CO in the base flowfield.