High angle-of-attack inviscid Shuttle Orbiter computation

Although the ultimate goal of this work is to accurately predict the leeside flow and its associated thermal environment, an essential and reasonable first step toward that goal is a comparison of pressure predictions by a code with wind-tunnel data. Until such computational fluid dynamic (CFD) pressure predictions agree with wind-tunnel test cases, there is little hope of accurately predicting the thermal environment at flight conditions. Thus, the objective of this study is to compare the pressure distributions predicted by inviscid, perfect gas CFD to Shuttle Orbiter wind-tunnel data and to address any significant issues encountered during the computation.