Numerical Investigation of Hypersonic Intake Flows

A numerical and experimental analysis of scramjet intake flows has been initiated at RWTH Aachen University as part of the Research Training Group GRK 1095: “Aero-Thermodynamic Design of a Scramjet Engine for a Future Space Transportation System”. This report presents an overview of the ongoing work on the numerical simulations of air intake flow using two different, well validated Reynolds averaged Navier Stokes solvers. Several geometry concepts e.g. 2D intake, 3D intake using a single or double ramp configuration were investigated. One example for the so-called 2D intake can be seen in Fig. 1 and for a 3D intake in Fig. 2. To analyze the effects these different geometries have on the flow, especially on the separation bubble in the isolator inlet as well as on transition and efficiency, several numerical simulations (2D and 3D) were performed using a variety of turbulence models. Mostly the Spalart–Allmaras – one equation model and the so called SSG–Reynolds stress model by Speziale, Sakar and Gatski were used. The data obtained will be compared with experimental results. These experiments started in March 2007. It has to be said that not all results presented here were achieved using the NEC computing cluster. For comparison several calculations were conducted on the IBM Jump system of the Jülich Research Centre and on the SUN cluster of RWTH Aachen University. At the end of this report we give comments on the computational performance.