Numerical investigation of store separation from cavity problems at high speeds

In this work, the ability of open-source CFD tools to conduct store separation simulations from cavities is evaluated and validated using a generic test case from the literature. Firstly, the ability and accuracy of these tools for solving cavity flows at high speeds are evaluated. Secondly, their competence in predicting the trajectory of a generic store from a generic deep cavity is checked. Finally, and in order to reduce the associated computational costs, a release-time dependability factor from the recent literature is studied and evaluated. The obtained results using the selected open-source CFD tools matched quite well with the wind tunnel results. Furthermore, the results show that predicting the release-time dependability using a quantified index/factor can be a potential remedy for reducing the computational cost for this type of CFD simulations.