Numerical Method for Particulate-Induced High-Speed Boundary-Layer Transition Simulations

Abstract

A new numerical method to efficiently simulate particulate interactions with high-speed transitional boundary-layer flows is presented. A particulate solver, employing Crowe’s correlation, is used to calculate the particulate trajectory. The solver is fully coupled via a particulate–flow interaction source term to a nonlinear disturbance flow solver based on the compressible Navier–Stokes equations. To efficiently simulate the particulate–flow interactions, an adaptive mesh refinement approach is used to capture the wide range of temporal and spatial scales present in the laminar–turbulent transition process. The particulate impingement simulations for a flow over a 14 deg wedge and two different particulate impingement locations employing the newly developed numerical approach are compared against simulations using a conventional static-mesh approach. For the flow conditions considered, oblique first-mode instability waves dominate the early stage of the transition process. In the second part of this paper, the differences between pulse and particulate impingement simulations are investigated in two and three dimensions for a flat-plate boundary-layer flow where two-dimensional second-mode instability waves are most amplified in the primary instability regime.