Numerical study of shock-disturbances interaction in hypersonic inviscid flows with real gas effects using high-order WENO scheme

Abstract

In the present study, the shock-disturbances interaction in hypersonic inviscid flows with real gas effects is studied by applying a high-order accurate numerical method with the shock capturing technique. To consider real gas effects, the equilibrium air model is utilized here. The strong conservative form of the unsteady compressible Euler equations in the 2D generalized curvilinear coordinates is formulated and the resulting system of equations for the equilibrium air model is discretized by using the fifth-order finite-difference WENO scheme in space and the explicit third-order TVD Runge–Kutta scheme in time to provide a highly accurate and robust equilibrium airflow solver. The solution methodology adopted based on the high-order WENO scheme with the shock capturing technique can reasonably simulate the strong discontinuities in the solution domain without needing any numerical artifact and this feature makes the solution method suitable for the shock-disturbances interaction in hypersonic flows in which real gas effects are to be considered. To study the physical phenomenon of the shock-disturbances interaction problem in high-speed inviscid equilibrium airflows, two test cases are simulated by applying the solution methodology adopted. In the first test case, the interaction between the incoming fast acoustic wave with the bow shock formed around a cylinder with the nose radius of RN=0.0381 m at M∞=8.03 and T∞=182.333 K is simulated. In the second test case, the cylinder radius is taken RN=2.54×10−2 m and the upstream velocity and temperature are u∞=5590m/s and T∞=1833 K, respectively, and all kinds of free stream disturbances, including the entropy wave and the fast and slow acoustic waves, for different wave numbers are considered. The computations are carried out for both the perfect gas and equilibrium air models and the effects of real gas on both the mean and disturbances fields are also studied. The present study introduces the first-known numerical investigation of the shock-disturbances interaction in hypersonic flow over blunt noses with real gas effects in which the numerical results obtained are thoroughly validated by the analytical/theoretical ones and good agreement is found.