EFFICIENT METHODS FOR INVISCID NONEQUILIBRIUM HYPERSONIC FLOW-FIELDS

Different methods are used for simulating steady, inviscid, non-equilibrium reactive flow governed by the Euler equations. The approximations employed are based on a conservative mixed Finite-Volume/Finite-Element formulation. The aim of the study is to improve the convergence rate of the iterative time integration. Variants of the implicit scheme (semi-implicit and fully implicit) are compared with another algorithm of the type of Newton's method which directly discretizes the stationary system. A special attention is paid to the update of the temperature in the solution of the species convection equation. Several computations of external blunt-body hypersonic flows have demonstrated the robustness and efficiency of the implicit scheme even when the Mach number is large (M infinity greater-than-or-equal-to 25) or when the global Damkohler number is varied.