Abstract:
For the research and development of near space flying vehicles, also as the same for conventional flying vehiclessuch as airplanes, the problems of transition and turbulence of the boundary layers are two important issues must be taken into consideration. However, even for conventional flying vehicles, these two problems are still not fully resolved, even though the investigations have been lasted for more than 100 years already. For near space flying vehicles, not only the related aerodynamics has its own unsolved fundamental scientific problems, let along the problems of transition and turbulence. In this paper, two related problems are focused on: 1) In order to enhance our capability of predicting the transition of the boundary layer of a hypersonic flying vehicle, what kinds of research work should we do and what difficulties we might face? 2) Would it be possible that there would be no problem of turbulence for its boundary layer if the attitude of the flying vehicle is sufficiently high?