An unstructured solver for argon plasma flows with reduced state-to-state kinetics

Abstract

An in-house developed, 2D/3D unstructured CFD solver has been extended to deal with a mixture of thermally perfect gases in chemical non-equilibrium. The Euler equations have been coupled with a state-to-state kinetic model for an argon plasma. The spatial discretization uses compact stencil, Residual Distribution schemes and shock waves can be modelled using either shock-capturing or shock-fitting. The chemical model has been verified by reference to a well-established Q1D code and promising results have been obtained using the shock-fitting approach for a 2D hypersonic flow past the fore-body of a circular cylinder

3D nozzle flow simulations including state-to-state kinetics calculation

“…This model consists in writing a continuity equation for the population of each vibrational level of molecules, determining species densities and their internal distributions [2], including not only vibrational states, but also electronically excited states [3] as well as non-maxwellian electron energy distribution functions (EEDF) by solving an adequate Boltzmann equation [4,5]. With few exceptions (see [6,7,8]), applications of the STS approach to high enthalpy flow simulation have been very limited, due to the significant computing time required to conduct even 1-D simulations [9,10,11].…”