ABSTRACT
From the engineering standpoint, thin sharpbodies are of limitedutility in hypersonic flight owing toprohibitive heating and evendestruction of sharpnoses and edges. Because of this, they are usually made blunt; however, at hypersonic velocities even a slight bluntness can appreciably affect the body drag and, therefore, the flow pattern. A considerable influence of a small bluntness on the flow past thin bodies was experimentally revealed by Hammitt and Bogdonoff (1955) and Bertram (1956) and explained in the works of Cheng and Pallone (1956) and Chernyi (1956, 1966) who related this effect with strong blast theory. In what follows wewill show that this theory with corresponding supplements (Lunev, 1975) reflects adequately the mechanisms governing these flows, though it has no pretensions to playing the part of an exact calculation technique for the problem under consideration. This chapter is devoted to the study of these mechanisms and the qualitative features of these flows in general.
