Numerical Investigation of Shock-wave/Isotropic Turbulence Interaction

Nathan Grube, Ellen Taylor, Pino Martin
2011 49th AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting including the New Horizons Forum and Aerospace Exposition   unpublished
We conduct direct numerical simulations (DNS) of shock/isotropic-turbulence interactions (SITI), in which the turbulence is highly compressible. We find, consistent with previous studies using less-compressible turbulence, that turbulent kinetic energy and transverse vorticity fluctuations become persistently amplified upon passage through a shock wave and that the Taylor microscales and Kolmogorov lengthcale all diminish. Jumps in thermodynamic quantities fall short of their laminar
more » ... In general, all of these effects tend to intensify with decreasing strength of upstream turbulence and with increasing strength of the normal shock. Comparison of individual terms for the vorticity variance budget shows that the amplification of vorticity is dominated by the compression term. Reynolds stress budgets show that downstream of the interaction, the pressure term acts to decrease the streamwise Reynolds stress and increase the transverse. Two-dimensional energy spectra show that the interaction leaves the spectrum with more energy in scales smaller than the original energetic scales. For the conditions chosen, the interaction corresponds to sharply-defined shocks across the entire wrinkled shock surface rather than distorted or broken shock fronts with regions of smooth compression. The shock structure follows the similarity scaling based on turbulent and convective Mach numbers as proposed by Donzis.
doi:10.2514/6.2011-480 fatcat:h7gdd2ittjbpflkjbzvtjptwzm