skip to main content
OSTI.GOV title logo U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Title: On Challenges for Hypersonic Turbulent Simulations

Conference ·
OSTI ID:946254

This short note discusses some of the challenges for design of suitable spatial numerical schemes for hypersonic turbulent flows, including combustion, and thermal and chemical nonequilibrium flows. Often, hypersonic turbulent flows in re-entry space vehicles and space physics involve mixed steady strong shocks and turbulence with unsteady shocklets. Material mixing in combustion poses additional computational challenges. Proper control of numerical dissipation in numerical methods beyond the standard shock-capturing dissipation at discontinuities is an essential element for accurate and stable simulations of the subject physics. On one hand, the physics of strong steady shocks and unsteady turbulence/shocklet interactions under the nonequilibrium environment is not well understood. On the other hand, standard and newly developed high order accurate (fourth-order or higher) schemes were developed for homogeneous hyperbolic conservation laws and mixed hyperbolic and parabolic partial differential equations (PDEs) (without source terms). The majority of finite rate chemistry and thermal nonequilibrium simulations employ methods for homogeneous time-dependent PDEs with a pointwise evaluation of the source terms. The pointwise evaluation of the source term might not be the best choice for stability, accuracy and minimization of spurious numerics for the overall scheme.

Research Organization:
Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE
DOE Contract Number:
W-7405-ENG-48
OSTI ID:
946254
Report Number(s):
LLNL-PROC-409893; TRN: US0900924
Resource Relation:
Conference: Presented at: 3rd International Conference on Numerical Modeling of Space Plasma Flows, US Virgin Islands, United States, Jun 08 - Jun 13, 2008
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English