Review of Rarefied Gas Effects in Hypersonic Applications

Abstract

Rarefied gas phenomena are found in a wide variety of hypersonic flow applications, and accurate characterization of such phenomena is often desired for engineering design and analysis. In atmospheric flows involving high Mach numbers and/or low densities, underlying assumptions in a continuum fluid dynamics description tend to break down, and distributions of both molecule velocity and internal energy modes can depart significantly from equilibrium. In this paper, characteristics of rarefied and nonequilibrium gas flows are discussed, and several numerical methods for rarefied flow simulation are outlined. A variety of hypersonic flow applications are presented, and additional discussion is provided for directions of current and future research.

Open PDF

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2011
Accession Number
ADA582766

Entities

People

  • Eswar Josyula
  • Jonathan Burt

Organizations

  • Air Force Research Laboratory

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Aerodynamic Characteristics
  • Air Force
  • Boltzmann Equation
  • Boundary Layer
  • Chemical Reactions
  • Computational Fluid Dynamics
  • Computational Science
  • Energy Transfer
  • Fluid Dynamics
  • Fluid Flow
  • Gas Dynamics
  • Gas Flow
  • Hydrodynamics
  • Hypersonic Flow
  • Knudsen Number
  • Microelectromechanical Systems
  • Physics Laboratories

Fields of Study

  • Physics

Readers

  • Fluid Dynamics.
  • Systems Analysis and Design

Technology Areas

  • Hypersonics
  • Hypersonics - Hypersonic Flight
  • Hypersonics - Hypersonic Flow