Computations of a Shock Layer Flow Field with Global and Detailed Chemistry Models

Abstract

The present work is a first step in computing a reactive gas flow behind a shock wave with detailed collision-radiative models. If simulating high-temperature, high-enthalpy, non-equilibrium gas flows in shock layers has been widely done so far with global models for the chemical kinetics and the vibrational non-equilibrium, it is quite new to compute such flow fields with detailed chemistry models. This is now possible as the computation and memory resources of the computers allow to run CFD codes with detailed models. State-specific vibrational models are efficient to model both the chemical reactions and the vibrational non-equilibrium at once, without making strong assumptions (like Boltzmann distribution) as it the case with multi-temperature models for vibrational non-equilibrium modeling.