The gas temperature within hypersonic boundary layer flow is so high that the specific heat of gas is no longer a constant but relates to temperature. How variable specific heat influences on boundary layer flow stability is worth researching. The effect of the variable specific heat on the stability of hypersonic boundary layer flows is studied and compared with the case of constant specific heat based on the linear stability theory. It is found that the variable specific heat indeed has some effects on the neutral curves of both the first-mode and the second-mode waves and on the maximum rate of growth also. Therefore, the relationship between specific heat and temperature should be considered in the study of the stability of the boundary layer.
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.
DONG Ming & ZHOU Heng Department of Mechanics,Tianjin University,Tianjin 300072,China
A new idea of using the parabolized stability equation （PSE） method to predict laminar-turbulent transition is proposed. It is tested in the prediction of the location of transition for compressible boundary layers on fiat plates, and the results are compared with those obtained by direct numerical simulations （DNS）. The agreement is satisfactory, and the reason for this is that the PSE method faithfully reproduces the mechanism leading to the breakdown process in laminar-turbulent transition, i.e., the modification of mean flow profile leads to a remarkable change in its stability characteristics.
Parabolized stability equations （PSE） approach is used to investigate problems of secondary instability in supersonic boundary layers. The results show that the mechanism of secondary instability does work, whether the 2-D fundamental disturbance is of the first mode or second mode T-S wave. The variation of the growth rates of the 3-D sub-harmonic wave against its span-wise wave number and the amplitude of the 2-D fundamental wave is found to be similar to those found in incompressible boundary layers. But even as the amplitude of the 2-D wave is as large as the order 2%, the maximum growth rate of the 3-D sub-harmonic is still much smaller than the growth rate of the most unstable second mode 2-D T-S wave. Consequently, secondary instability is unlikely the main cause leading to transition in supersonic boundary layers.
A new method for computing laminar-turbulent transition and turbulence in compressible boundary layers is proposed. It is especially useful for computation of laminar-turbulent transition and turbulence starting from small-amplitude disturbances. The laminar stage, up to the beginning of the breakdown in laminar-turbulent transition, is computed by parabolized stability equations （PSE）. The direct numerical simulation （DNS） method is used to compute the transition process and turbulent flow, for which the inflow condition is provided by using the disturbances obtained by PSE method up to that stage. In the two test cases including a subsonic and a supersonic boundary layer, the transition locations and the turbulent flow obtained with this method agree well with those obtained by using only DNS method for the whole process. The computational cost of the proposed method is much less than using only DNS method.
