By direct numerical simulation, a supersonic boundary layer was studied to see whether the mechanism for the generation of sub-harmonic waves, similar to those for the incompressible flows, existed in the process of laminar-turbulent transition. The results showed that mechanisms of both resonant triad and secondary instability did exist. Discussions were made on whether these two mechanisms are really important in laminarturbulent transition.
The inflow conditions for spatial direct numerical simulation(SDNS) of turbulent boundary layers should reflect the characteristics of upstream turbulence,which is a puzzle. In this paper a new method is suggested,in which the flow field obtained by using temporal direct numerical simulation(TDNS) for fully developed turbulent flow(only flow field for a single moment is sufficient) can be used as the inflow of SDNS with a proper transformation. The calculation results confirm that this method is feasible and effective. It is also found that,under a proper time-space transformation,all statistics of the fully developed turbulence obtained by both temporal mode and spatial mode DNS are in excellent agreement with each other,not only qualitatively,but also quantitatively. The normal-wise distributions of mean flow profile,turbulent Mach number and the root mean square(RMS) of the fluctuations of various variables,as well as the Reynolds stresses of the fully developed turbulence obtained by using SDNS,bear similarity in nature.
HUANG ZhangFeng & ZHOU Heng Department of Mechanics,Tianjin University,Tianjin 300072,China
Spatial mode direct numerical simulation has been applied to study the mechanism of breakdown in laminar-turbulent transition of a supersonic boundary layer on a flat plate with Mach number 4.5. Analysis of the result showed that, during the breakdown process in laminar-turbulent transition, the mechanism causing the mean flow profile to evolve swiftly from laminar to turbulent was that the modification of mean flow profile by the disturbance, when they became larger, leads to remarkable change of its stability characteristics. Though the most unstable T-S wave was of second mode for laminar flow, the first mode waves played the key role in the breakdown process in laminar-turbulent transition.
The spatial evolution of 2-D disturbances in supersonic sharp cone boundary layers was investigated by direct numerical simulation (DNS) in high order compact difference scheme. The results suggested that, although the normal velocity in the sharp cone boundary layer was not small, the evolution of amplitude and phase for small amplitude disturbances would be well in accordance with the results obtained by the linear stability theory (LST) which supposes the flow was parallel. The evolution of some finite amplitude disturbances was also investigated, and the characteristic of the evolution was shown. Shocklets were also found when the amplitude of disturbances increased over some value.
Temporal mode direction numerical simulation has been done for the transition of a supersonic boundary layer on a flat plate with Mach number 4.5. Analysis of the result showed that during the breakdown process in laminar-turbulent transition, the mechanism causing the mean flow profile to evolve swiftly from laminar to turbulent was that the modification of mean flow profile by the disturbances,when they became larger,led to a remarkable change of its stability characteristics. Though the most unstable T-S wave was of second mode for laminar flow, the first mode waves played the key role in the breakdown process in laminar-turbulent transition.
HUANG Zhangfeng 1, CAO Wei 1,2 & ZHOU Heng 1,2 1. Department of Mechanics, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, China
