Three-dimensional receptivity of a high-speed blunt cone to different types of freestream disturbances

Abstract

Receptivity to freestream disturbances is the initial stage of the boundary-layer transition process, which can determine the final path of boundary-layer disturbance triggering transition. At present, researches on the receptivity of two-dimensional boundary layer to disturbances with zero incident angles, are relatively sufficient. In fact, the freestream disturbances often propagate into the boundary layer in the form of non-zero incident angles, resulting in a component of spatial disturbances in the circumferential direction of rotating bodies (such as a cone). It is a receptivity problem with a distinct three-dimensional feature. However, research on this three-dimensional receptivity problem is relatively scarce. The preliminary work only studied the three-dimensional receptivity to low-frequency incident slow acoustic waves. There has not been a systematic study on the three-dimensional receptivity to different types of freestream disturbances. The paper conducts a study on the three-dimensional receptivity of a blunt cone to different freestream disturbances. Firstly, a high-resolution numerical simulation method is used to compute the three-dimensional receptivity process by introduce freestream disturbances with 15 degree incident angles. The freestream disturbances include fast acoustic wave, slow acoustic wave, entropy wave, and vortex wave. Their frequencies are selected as dimensionless 1.1 and 5, corresponding to the frequencies of the first mode and second mode, respectively. Then, the phase velocity and shape function of the boundary-layer disturbances at each circumferential position for the numerical results are obtained by Fourier transform. To interpret the receptivity mechanisms, the corresponding results by linear stability analysis are obtained for comparisons. It is found that, the first and second modes of the boundary layer can be effectively excited by the incident slow acoustic waves; It is difficult for the incident fast acoustic waves to excite unstable modes in the boundary layer; The incident entropy wave and vortex wave are difficult to excite the first mode at low frequency, but can excite the second mode at high frequency. Furthermore, the incident angle of the freestream disturbances can cause the differences in the receptivity at different circumferential positions of the cone, which can be reflected in two ways. One is the difference in the dominant disturbance form at different circumferential positions; The second is the difference in the amplitude of boundary-layer disturbances. Under different disturbance types and frequencies, these differences between different circumferential positions exhibit different results. The strongest receptivity may occur on the incident front, the incident back, and the incident side. These phenomena may be the result of the combined action of the upstream head disturbances and the disturbances on the incident front.