variavel0=<b>Daniel Strauss</b> - daniel@tecsis.com.br Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica
<b>João Luiz F. Azevedo</b> - azevedo@iae.cta.br Centro Técnico Aeroespacial
<b>Abstract.</b> A study of the flowfield around axisymmetric launch vehicles in different flight conditions and configurations is performed in this work. Particularly, the VLS second stage configuration is analyzed considering the case with and without a propulsive jet in the vehicle base. The study is performed using a cell centered finite volume formulation on unstructured grids. Different spatial discretization schemes are compared, including a centered and an upwind scheme. The upwind scheme is a second-order version of the Liou flux vector splitting scheme. Turbulence effects are accounted for using two one-equation turbulence closure models, namely the Baldwin and Barth and the Spalart and Allmaras models. An agglomeration multigrid algorithm is used to accelerate the converge to steady-state of the numerical solutions. The numerical results obtained are compared with experimental data as well as with previous structured grid simulations.
<b>Keywords.</b> Agglomeration multigrid, Turbulent flows, Upwind schemes, VLS.