The interaction of turbulence with shock waves

Air Force Office of Scientific Research

 

                  

This project used direct numerical simulation and linear analysis to study the interaction between shock waves and turbulent flows. It was the topic of Mahesh's doctoral dissertation with Professors Parviz Moin & Sanjiva Lele of Stanford University. The primary motivation was that shock waves are very common in supersonic turbulent flows, and can cause serious problems like wing stall, unsteadiness of flow in engine inlets, and high frequency noise in jet exhaust. Furthermore, most engineering models are unable to reliably predict the effect of shock waves on turbulent flows. This work asked the question, 'How does a shock wave of known strength interact with a turbulent flow with known properties?'. The study isolated different aspects of the problem such as the effects of turbulence anisotropy (Mahesh, Lele & Moin 1994), upstream acoustic waves (Mahesh, Lele & Moin 1995), and upstream entropy fluctuations (Mahesh, Lele & Moin 1997). Scaling laws were proposed for each of these effects, and the inability of popular models to predict some of these effects was demonstrated and explained. The results have been recently used to develop an improved engineering model (Sinha, Mahesh & Candler, 2003 and 2005).

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