Experiment design to capture the undisturbed merging of streamwise vortices in supersonic flow

Publication Date

1-1-2020

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Title

AIAA Scitech 2020 Forum

DOI

10.2514/6.2020-0812

Abstract

Typical residence times of the flow in the combustor of hypersonic air-breathing vehicles are on the order of 1ms, thus the combustion process is severely mixing-limited. The introduction of supersonic streamwise vortices can increase flow residence time. Supersonic streamwise vortices have the ability to interact and re-orient their vorticity content in numerous ways, a capability that may be leveraged to gain control authority on both largescale stirring motion and turbulence production and decay. Recent studies showed that the merger resulting from the coalescence of two co-rotating streamwise vortices shed in a supersonic free-stream is characterized by amplified turbulence levels when compared to those measured in single structures. This can be leveraged to enhance mixing in specific areas of a scramjet combustor. However, due to the inherent challenge in capturing the aforementioned process from its origin up to the circularization of the resulting vorticity patch in supersonic flow, so far no data have been collected of the incipient merging. This work presents a detailed review of the proposed experiment design to achieve this and the reducedorder models used to describe the flow physics of interest.

Department

Aerospace Engineering

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