Flow Physics: Turbulence and shockwave interactions

Mach 2.9, Req=2300 and 24° compression corner Ringuette & Martin AIAAJ 2008

Shockwave and turbulent boundary layer interactions produce intense localized pressure loads and heating rates on hypersonic vehicles over control surfaces and inside scramjet engines. The lack of standardized and traceable databases prevents the calibration of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models. In turn, the lack of accurate and robust prediction capabilities results in over-compensation in setting safety factors and leads to poor vehicle designs. Our research in this area has the goal of improving the basic understanding of two-dimensional and three-dimensional shockwave/turbulent boundary layer interactions (STBLI) via accurate numerical investigations while establishing a database of traceable, standardized STBLI flows that can be used to build predictive CFD capabilities for large-scale calculations (i.e. design-type calculations).