Compressibility Driven Wake Transition and Hysteresis over Cargo Aircraft Aftbodies

Abstract

Aft sections of military cargo aircraft employ flat surfaces at high upsweep angles to accommodate ramp doors, producing flow features that affect cargo-drop accuracy, paratrooper safety, and aerodynamic performance. Fundamental studies have primarily examined near incompressible flow over a canonical surrogate consisting of a freestream aligned cylinder with a planar, sharp edged upswept base. The flow exhibits peripheral separation, a horseshoe vortex, and a counter-rotating streamwise vortex pair that persists downstream. The present investigation delineates the effects of compressibility on the wake and examines how these effects depend on basal upsweep angle. Wall-resolved large-eddy simulations are performed at Mach numbers of $0.1$, $0.3$, and $0.5$ for upsweep angles of $32^\circ$ and $45^\circ$ at a nominal Reynolds number of $25{,}000$. For the $32^\circ$ afterbody, increasing Mach number enlarges the upstream recirculation region and delays vortex-pair formation, while these effects diminish downstream. For the $45^\circ$ afterbody, similar recirculation-region growth triggers a bifurcation at Mach~0.5 from the vortex-pair state to a broad separated turbulent wake. A descending-Mach sequence to 0.3 and 0.1 reveals hysteresis, with the separated-wake state persisting at lower Mach numbers and remaining robust to Reynolds-number variation. Thus, both states can occur at identical Mach and Reynolds numbers, with topology and pressure loading governed by Mach number history.