Predicting Hypersonic Laminar-Turbulent Transition with Direct Numerical Simulation
Abstract
Hypersonic flight is currently a priority for the US Department of Defense, but technologydevelopment in this area is limited by the inability of ground test facilities to replicate flightconditions. One of the key problems is the failure to reproduce laminar-turbulent transitionbecause of wind tunnel freestream noise. (There are no existing quiet wind tunnels in the UnitedStates that can run above Mach 6.) The objective of the proposed project is to predict laminarturbulenttransition in conventional, noisy, hypersonic wind tunnels using direct numericalsimulation on supercomputers. This capability would allow us to better understand experimentsin conventional hypersonic wind tunnels, and make data from such experiments much morevaluable for vehicle design. For comparison to the proposed computations, experimental data areavailable from hypersonic wind tunnels at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Arnold EngineeringDevelopment Center, the US Air Force Academy, Sandia National Laboratory, and TUBraunschweig. These experimental groups have indicated that they can provide us with therequired data. We will attempt to predict the freestream acoustic noise spectrum generated byacoustic radiation from turbulent boundary layers on the tunnel side-walls, and examine theeffect of this noise on boundary layer transition. Existing, parallel, high-order computer codesare available to carry out the computations, and a companion DoD HPCMP Frontier proposal hasbeen submitted to provide the computer hours for the work. Our codes have demonstratedexcellent scaling to over 100 thousand cores, and with sufficient resources, we are positioned tomake a breakthrough in this area. Here we request financial support for a five-year programaligned with the Frontier project, including support for one graduate student at each of our twouniversities. (If we do not win a Frontier award, we can still proceed with the proposed work, butwe will have to restrict the range of Reynolds number that we consider.)
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- May 05, 2017
- Source ID
- N000141712374
Entities
People
- Jonathan Poggie
Organizations
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy
- University of Virginia