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Technical Paper

CFD Analysis of the American Challenger Rocket Car

2006-04-03
2006-01-0809
This paper details a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis of the American Challenger car, a rocket-powered vehicle, under development by Bill Fredrick, which is intended to set a new world land speed record. Two different vehicle configurations were analyzed in order to evaluate lift, drag, and moment characteristics at various conditions. The geometries differed in the design of the rear strut and wheel housing; one having a diamond-shape profile, and the other a bi-convex, double-cusp shape. Steady-state simulations of the entire vehicle were performed at 4,000 ft elevation conditions, with and without active propulsion, and at varying vehicle Mach numbers: 0.6, 0.8, 0.95, and 1.05. The computations were performed on an unstructured mesh of approximately 8.2 million computational cells, which includes half of the vehicle with a symmetry plane (thus, sideslip is not taken into consideration).
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