The improvement of turbulence modeling for the aerothermal computation of hypersonic turbulent boundary layers

Abstract

The engineering computation of turbulent flows is mainly based on turbulence modeling, however, accurate aerothermal computation of hypersonic turbulent boundary layers is still a not well-solved problem. Aerothermal computation for turbulent boundary layers on a supersonic or hypersonic blunt cone with small bluntness is done firstly by using both direct numerical simulation and BL model, and seven different cases are investigated. Then the results obtained by the two methods are compared, and the reason causing the differences is found to be the incorrect assumption in the turbulence modeling that the ratio between eddy heat conductivity and eddy viscosity is constant throughout the whole boundary layer. Based on certain theoretical arguments, a method of modifying the expression of eddy heat conductivity in the region surrounding the peak location of the turbulent kinetic energy is proposed, which is verified to be effective, at least for the seven cases investigated.