High-order shock-fitting methods for direct numerical simulation of hypersonic flow with chemical and thermal nonequilibrium

In recent years, much progress has been made in the direct numerical simulation of laminar-turbulent transition of hypersonic boundary layer flow. However, most of the efforts at the direct numerical simulation of transition previously have been focused on the idealized perfect gas flow or “cold” hypersonic flows. For practical problems in hypersonic flows, high-temperature effects of thermal and chemical nonequilibrium are important and cannot be modeled by a perfect gas model. Therefore, it is necessary to include the real gas models in the numerical simulation of hypersonic boundary layer transition in order to accurately predict flow field parameters. Currently most numerical methods for hypersonic flow with thermo-chemical nonequilibrium are based on shock-capturing approach at relatively low order of accuracy. Shock capturing schemes reduce to first-order accuracy near the shock and have been shown to produce spurious oscillations behind curved strong shocks. There is a need to develop new methods capable of simulating nonequilibrium hypersonic flow fields with uniformly high-order accuracy and avoid spurious oscillations near the shock. This paper presents a fifth-order shock-fitting method for numerical simulation of thermal and chemical nonequilibrium in hypersonic flows. The method is developed based on the state-of-the-art real gas models for thermo-chemical nonequilibrium and transport phenomena. Shock-fitting approach is used because it has the advantage of capturing the entire flow field with high-order accuracy and without any oscillations near the shock. The new method has been tested and validated for a number of test cases over a wide span of free stream conditions. The developed method is applied for the study of receptivity of free stream acoustic waves over a blunt cone for hypervelocity flow. Some preliminary results of the computations of the high order shock fitting method for the above mentioned study have also been presented.