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A hypersonic, spatially evolving turbulent boundary layer at Mach 12.48 with a cooled wall is analysed by means of direct numerical simulations. At the selected conditions, massive kinetic-to-internal energy conversion triggers thermal and chemical non-equilibrium phenomena. Air is assumed to behave as a five-species reacting mixture, and a two-temperature model is adopted to account for vibrational non-equilibrium. Wall cooling partly counteracts the effects of friction heating, and the temperature rise in the boundary layer excites vibrational energy modes while inducing mild chemical dissociation of oxygen. Vibrational non-equilibrium is mostly driven by molecular nitrogen, characterized by slower relaxation rates than the other molecules in the mixture. The results reveal that thermal non-equilibrium is sustained by turbulent mixing: sweep and ejection events efficiently redistribute the gas, contributing to the generation of a vibrationally under-excited state close to the wall, and an over-excited state in the outer region of the boundary layer. The tight coupling between turbulence and thermal effects is quantified by defining an interaction indicator. A modelling strategy for the vibrational energy turbulent flux is proposed, based on the definition of a vibrational turbulent Prandtl number. The validity of the strong Reynolds analogy under thermal non-equilibrium is also evaluated. Strong compressibility effects promote the translational–vibrational energy exchange, but no preferential correlation was detected between expansions/compressions and vibrational over-/under-excitation, as opposed to what has been observed for unconfined turbulent configurations.

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High-speed turbulent boundary layers of a dense gas (PP11) and a perfect gas (air) over flat plates are investigated by means of direct numerical simulations and large eddy simulations. The thermodynamic conditions of the incoming flow are chosen to highlight dense gas effects, and laminar-to-turbulent transition is triggered by suction and blowing. In the paper, the behavior of the fully developed turbulent flow region is investigated. Due to the low characteristic Eckert number of dense gas flows ( Ec = U 2 ∞ ∕c p,∞ T ∞ ), the mean velocity profiles are largely insensitive to the Mach number and very close to the incompressible case even at high speeds. Second-order velocity statistics are also weakly affected by the flow Mach number and the velocity spectra are characterized by a secondary peak in the outer region of the boundary layer because of the higher local friction Reynolds number. Despite the incompressible-like velocity and Reynolds-stress profiles, the strongly nonideal thermodynamic and transport-property behavior of the dense gas results in unconventional distributions of the fluctuating thermo-physical quantities. Specifically, density and viscosity fluctuations reach a peak close to the wall, instead of vanishing as in perfect gas flows. Additionally, dense gas boundary layers exhibit higher values of the fluctuating Mach number and velocity divergence and a larger dilatational-to-solenoidal dissipation ratio in the near-wall region, which represents a major deviation from high-Mach-number perfect gas boundary layers. Other significant deviations are represented by the more symmetric probability distributions of fluctuating quantities such as the density and velocity divergence, due to the more balanced occurrence of strong expansion and compression events.

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The influence of high-enthalpy effects on hypersonic turbulent boundary layers is investigated by means of direct numerical simulations (DNS). A quasi-adiabatic flat-plate air flow at free-stream Mach number equal to 10 is simulated up to fully-developed turbulent conditions using a fivespecies, chemically-reacting model. A companion DNS based on a frozen-chemistry assumption is also carried out, in order to isolate the effect of finite-rate chemical reactions and assess their influence on turbulent quantities. In order to reduce uncertainties associated with turbulence generation at the inlet of the computational domain, both simulations are initiated in the laminar flow region and the flow is let to evolve up to the fully turbulent regime. Modal forcing by means of localized suction and blowing is used to trigger laminar-to-turbulent transition. The high temperatures reached in the near wall region including the viscous and buffer sublayers activate significant dissociation of both oxygen and nitrogen. This modifies in turn the thermodynamic and transport properties of the reacting mixture, affecting the first-order statistics of thermodynamic quantities. Due to the endothermic nature of the chemical reactions in the forward direction, temperature and density fluctuations in the reacting layer are smaller than in the frozen-chemistry flow. However, the first-and second-order statistics of the velocity field are found to be little affected by the chemical reactions under a scaling that accounts for the modified fluid properties. We also observed that the Strong Reynolds Analogy (SRA) remains well respected despite the severe hypersonic conditions and that the computed skin friction coefficient distributions match well the results of the Renard-Deck decomposition extended to compressible flows.

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