Particle/Shock Interaction for the BOLT-II Flight Experiment

What is it about?

During hypersonic flight, atmospheric particulates can impinge on the vehicle bow shock, cross the shock layer, and impinge on the boundary layer. All of these particle/flowfield interactions generate acoustic noise in the flowfield, which can excite unstable modes in the boundary layer and trip transition to turbulence. This work compares a Particle-Source-In-Cell (PSIC) method and a volume-resolved method to determine the efficacy of using the PSIC method to model a particle crossing a shock for a BOLT-II flight condition. Results show that the zero-volume nature of the PSIC method under-resolves the particle-induced flowfield features needed to predict the resultant shock motion and acoustic disturbances. An overset method is proposed to resolve particle-induced flowfield features at the particle length scale. Adaptations to low-dissipation numerical methods are proposed for use with the overset method. The proposed method is extensible to realistic geometries such as BOLT-II when coupled with improved interpolation methods and overset grid motion.

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