A computational study of leading-edge wall cooling effect on shock wave–boundary layer interaction in forward-facing step

Abstract

A computational study has been done to understand the effect of leading-edge wall cooling on shock wave–boundary layer interaction. Shock wave–boundary layer interaction is studied over a forward-facing step at supersonic Mach 2.5. The study was carried out using Ansys. The work aims to explore the implementation of wall cooling at the leading edge as a separation control strategy for supersonic forward-facing step-induced flow separation. We use a finite-volume method based on upwind flux difference splitting and second-order upwind flow discretization. The simulation results are validated with the available experimental data. Furthermore, using numerical simulations, we found that the separation bubble size was reduced by 18.36% when the walls were marginally cooled to 150 K, while the separation was reduced by 32.65% when the walls were strongly cooled to 100 K.