Wavelet-based Adaptive Techniques Applied to Turbulent Hypersonic Scramjet Intake Flows

The simulation of hypersonic flows is computationally demanding due to the large gradients of the flow variables at hand, caused both by strong shock waves and thick boundary or shear layers. The resolution of those gradients imposes the use of ex-tremely small cells in the respective regions. Taking turbulence into account intensifies the variation in scales even more. Furthermore, hypersonic flows have been shown to be extremely grid sensitive. For the simulation of fully three-dimensional configurations of engineering applications, this results in a huge amount of cells and as a consequence prohibitive computational time. Therefore, modern adaptive techniques can provide a gain with respect to both computational costs and accuracy, allowing the generation of locally highly resolved flow regions where they are needed and retaining an otherwise smooth distribution. In this paper, an h-adaptive technique based on wavelets is employed for the solution of hypersonic flows. The compressible Reynolds averaged Navier-Stokes equations are solved using a differential Reynolds stress turbulence model, well suited to predict shock-wave-boundary-layer interactions in high enthalpy flows. Two test cases are considered: a compression corner at 15 degrees and a scramjet intake. The compres-sion corner is a classical test case in hypersonic flow investigations because it poses a shock-wave-turbulent-boundary-layer interaction problem. The adaptive procedure is applied to a two-dimensional configuration as validation. The scramjet intake is firstly computed in two dimensions. Subsequently a three-dimensional geometry is considered. Both test cases are validated with experimental data and compared to non-adaptive computations. The results show that the use of an adaptive technique for hypersonic turbulent flows at high enthalpy conditions can strongly improve the performance in terms of memory and CPU time while at the same time maintaining the required accuracy of the results