AN EXPLORATION OF CHEMICALLY REACTING VISCOUS HYPERSONIC FLOW

In continuation of the research and development work at the ICA in the field of hypersonic reentry flows, the present paper deals with the consideration of real gas effects and in particular with the description of mass transfer in chemically reacting flow. Previous work of the ICA in this field was concerned with the numerical simulation of Euler flow with an extension to non-equilibrium chemistry and to non-reacting viscous hypersonic flow. The present account starts with an investigation of the numerical scheme for the time integration of the chemical kinetics and discusses its interaction with the temporal development of the flow field. The extension of the method to the viscous reactive case is straightforward from the computational point of view, but the complexity of the physical models for the mass transport introduces major difficulties. Both issues are discussed in the paper from the fundamental point of view and the experience on numerical examples.