Mixing characteristics of a transverse jet injection into supersonic crossflows through an expansion wall

Mixing characteristics of a transverse jet injection into supersonic crossflows through an expansion plate are investigated using large eddy simulation (LES), where the expansion effects on the mixing are analyzed emphatically by comparing to the flat-plate counterpart. An adaptive central-upwind weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) scheme along with multi-threaded and multi-process MPI/OpenMP parallel is adopted to improve the accuracy and efficiency of the calculations. Progressive mesh refinement study is performed to assess the grid resolution and solution convergence. Statistic results obtained are compared to the experimental data and recently performed classical numerical simulation, which validates the reliability of the present LES codes. Firstly, the jet mixing mechanisms in the flowfield with expansion plate are revealed. It indicates that the large-scale vortices in the windward side of jet plume induced by Kelvin-Helmholtz (K-H) instability contribute to the mixing in the near-field, while the entrainment by the counter-rotating vortices and molecular diffusion dominate the mixing process in the far-field. Furthermore, the effects of wall expansion on the flow and mixing characteristics are discussed. The boundary layer across the expansion corner is relaminarized and the profiles of streamwise velocity are distinctly changed. Then the separation region ahead of jet plume is more close to the wall, and the breaking process of large-scale vortices in the windward side of jet plume starts earlier. However, the favorable pressure gradient generated by wall expansion reduces the mixing efficiency and brings a greater total pressure loss.