CFD Analysis of Micro-Ramps for Hypersonic Flows

Abstract

Air intake is a crucial component for supersonic and hypersonic air breathing propulsion devices. The intake must provide the required mass flow rate of air with minimal loss of stagnation pressure. A major difficulty in the stable operation of an intake is associated with shock wave boundary layer interaction (SBLI). This causes boundary layer separation and adverse pressure gradients which lead to total pressure loss, flow unsteadiness and flow distortion in the intake system. Passive control devices such as micro-ramp, thick-vanes provide better boundary layer control and reduce parasitic drag. The proposed study aims to perform CFD analysis of micro-ramp for hypersonic flows and validate the results with the available experimental data. Two micro ramp models namely MR80 and MR40 are considered for this study. Results obtained show the presence of micro ramp successfully delayed the flow separation and helped to suppress SBLI.

CFD investigation of shock boundary layer interaction in hypersonic flow and flow control using micro ramps

“…It is interesting to note that excluding the research work of Saad et al (2012), most of the research activities by Babinsky et al (2009), Li and Liu (2010) and Sun et al (2010) on passive flow control devices which are mainly dealt on supersonic flow regimes. Hypersonic flows are characterized by higher-order energy interactions and require dedicated studies and it is not possible to directly correlate the results of supersonic flow regimes with hypersonic flows (Saad et al , 2012; Mogrekar and Sivakumar, 2014). The objective of this study is to perform an accurate three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation to investigate the performance of MRs in single and array configurations for delaying the boundary layer separation in hypersonic flow regimes (∼Mach 5).…”