Towards modeling and simulation of particulate interactions with high-speed transitional boundary-layer flows

This paper presents a numerical approach to simulate particulate interactions with high-speed transitional boundary-layer flows. A particle solver is used to simulate the trajectory of particulates, and the solver is coupled via a particulate-flow interaction source term to a nonlinear disturbance flow solver based on the compressible Navier-Stokes equations. To efficiently simulate the particulate flow interactions, an adaptive mesh refinement approach is utilized. 2-D and 3-D particulate flow simulation results are presented. The flow conditions for the 2-D simulations were chosen such that 2-D second-mode instability waves are most amplified, and the frequency range of the disturbances introduced by the particulate collision falls within the unstable frequency range. Although the 2-D simulations were mainly used to test out our new simulation approach, some basic physics were also explored, such as the effect of the particulate size and the impingement location, on the generated disturbance flow field. For the 3-D simulations, two different flow conditions were considered: (1) a M=5.35 flat plate boundary-layer flow where 2-D second-mode instability waves are most amplified, and comparison data from established pulse simulations are available and (2) a M=4 14 degree wedge where 3-D first-mode instability waves are most amplified, and comparison data from other particulate-flow interaction simulations are available. The main purpose of this work is to introduce and validate our adaptive mesh refinement based particulate-flow interaction simulation approach.