The BOLT-1B Flight Experiment: Pre-flight Aerodynamic Modeling

The Boundary Layer Transition (BOLT) series of flight experiments was initiated by the United States Air Force Office of Scientific Research in 2017 to study flow phenomena relating to hypersonic boundary-layer transition and turbulent flow on low-curvature concave lifting surfaces with highly-swept leading edges. This paper details the pre-flight aerodynamic modeling carried out in support of the BOLT-1B flight experiment which was launched in September, 2024. The modeling approach presented here includes multi-fidelity analysis meant to anchor a large database of low-to-medium fidelity predictions based off inviscid and correlation-based methods by leveraging a subset of high-fidelity, viscous computations. The efforts of this study were primarily focused on anchoring vehicle drag, static stability, roll-driving, and roll-damping. The resulting aerodynamic database was then used to inform predictions of the scientific conditions for the flight experiment, including trajectory modeling and prediction of flight dynamics.