Computational and experimental study of deflected nose of missile at subsonic speed

Increased demand in the performance of missiles has led to extensive research in the field of slender body aerodynamics techniques for missile control. The major characteristics of a missile are its range and maneuverability. Usually, maneuvering is done by the deflection of a set of control surfaces attached to the body, most common are canard control, wing control and tail control. Deflected nose is an alternative to canard wing control with advantages regarding downwash. Deflection in nose also causes the generation of the vortices at the end of the missile. These vortices cause a significant amount of effect over the force generation in the missile. This report includes the computational and experimental study of a deflected nose missile at subsonic speed and in comparison with the normal missile. In this report we are only studying missile with deflected nose. The research was done at various angles of nose deflection and at different angles of attack at subsonic speed for quantitative and qualitative study to understand the effect precisely. The computation was carried out in Fluent using unsteady laminar flow and design was created in Auto-CAD and Gambit. Results consist of lift, moment, pressure magnitude and vorticity contours over the missile of many nose deflection configurations and angles of attack. Results depict good effects of deflected nose over the missile in comparison to the missile without any nose deflection in terms of force and momentum generation. All the experiments and computations have been performed at subsonic speeds. The overall study reflects good explanation for the aerodynamics flow phenomena over the missile with deflected nose. These studies show as high a moment generated over the missile when compared to canard control. The deflected nose also produces less or no downwash on the sides which effects over the wing or any other control surface. The vorticity contour shows good results.