In the last decades, human’s ability to penetrate further into space and accomplish more complex missions has improved dramatically. In parallel, increasingly sophisticated and faster weapons, such as hypersonic missiles, have been developed. For these reasons, also the need to study the phenomena that occur while travelling at very high speeds has arisen in both the civil and military sectors. Hypersonic flows are significantly more challenging to simulate than conventional subsonic or supersonic flows, due to additional complex physical processes such as shocks, chemical reactions and plasma formation. Consequently, it is not possible to adopt the same numerical models and methods commonly used to predict the property and behaviour of low-speed flow, because they are incomplete and can not manage properly all the complexities that occur in hypersonic flow.