Analysis of shock wave-boundary layer interaction in a shock tube using higher order scheme

Abstract

Over the last couple of decades, the shock-wave boundary-layer interaction has gained a lot of attention due to its practical importance in many engineering applications. It is a complex problem involving shock-wave bifurcation, boundary-layer separation, the interaction of contact discontinuity with the shock wave, the formation of shocklets, and the evolution of vortical structures having different length scales. It is difficult to capture experimentally the detailed flow field having the shocklets and vortices. Numerical solvers having negligible numerical dissipation are highly essential to predict these structures accurately. Over the years, many researchers have obtained a grid-converged solution for shock-wave boundary-layer interaction at Reynolds numbers of 200 and 1000. The shock-wave boundary-layer interaction at higher Reynolds numbers is not attempted due to the requirement of huge computational resources and challenges associated with convergence. In the investigation, the grid-converged solution is obtained for a Reynolds number of 2500 with a 13th order high-resolution hybrid scheme using 100 cores of a computational cluster equipped with 3.0 GHz Intel Xeon processors incorporating the MPI library for parallelization. The complex flow field is analysed in detail using wall density, density gradient, vorticity, pressure, and enstrophy plots after validating the solver with the benchmark wall pressure, density, and v-velocity around the primary vortex provided by Zhou et al. (2018), Phys. Fluids, 30, 016102 for a Reynolds number 1000. It is observed that the triple point height and number of vortices in both separated zone and at the shear layer increase with an increase in Reynolds number. The grid-converged data obtained from the present simulation can be used as benchmark data to validate different numerical schemes/solvers at higher Reynolds numbers.