DES uses hybrid approach and it can handle flow separation well. If you are considering to apply DES for the Hypersonic flow regime, kindly check about the "Governing Physics" and add the required terms in the governing equations.

Hello Samuel,

the answer is yes if you use compressible DES being able to capture large temperature gradients (omitting chemical reactions in a first step)and shocks. But note also that this can only hold if the Knudsen number is not too large, i.e. the capsule flies already in an environment with significant gas density. But still then the Reynolds number is relatively low, and the boundary layers are often laminar, only free shear layers may cause large-scale flow unsteadiness. Hence try to compute without turbulence model (but with shock capturing) and check for alterations of the results.

The two following references have used DES to capture the turbulent crossflow separation around a 6:1 prolate-spheroid at incidence.

G. S. Constantinescu, H. Pasinato, Y.-Q. Wang, J. R. Forsythe, K. D. Squires, Numerical investigation of flow past a prolate spheroid, Journal of Fluids Engineering 124 (4) (2002) 904–910.

Z. Xiao, Y. Zhang, J. Huang, H. Chen, S. Fu, Prediction of separation flows around a 6: 1 prolate-spheroid using rans/les hybrid approaches, Acta Mechanica Sinica 23 (4) (2007) 369–382.

The obtained results demonstrate that the model suffers from the choice of turbulence model, due to its high dependence on RANS model in boundary layer region.

Therefore, cares must be taken in the choice of the turbulence model to close the RANS equations. In this regard, the anisotropic Reynolds stress turbulence models have shown better performance compared to the isotropic eddy viscosity models.