Vortex breakdown

Center for Turbulence Research

 

The Pade scheme (Lele 1992) has been very popular in direct numerical simulation of compressible turbulent flows. We have developed a compact scheme (Mahesh 1998) which for the same stencil width as the Pade scheme, is two orders higher in accuracy, and has significantly better spectral representation. Also, we have worked on the problem of vortex breakdown. Under certain conditions, streamwise vortices that are shed from the forebody of supersonic aircraft, get ingested into the air-intake, where they break down upon interacting with the shock waves in the intake. We developed an analytical expression (Mahesh 1996) without adjustable constants for the critical swirl number, which agrees with data quite well over a range of Mach numbers from 1.3 to 10. The model was also extended to predict breakdown in the absence of a shock wave, and incompressible vortex breakdown.

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