Diffusion and chemical non-equilibrium effects on hypersonic boundary-layer stability
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2018, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Inc, AIAA. All rights reserved. Boundary-layer transition prediction has a dramatic impact on the optimization of hypersonic cruise and entry vehicle design. Linear Stability Theory approaches laminar-to-turbulent transition in a simplified yet physics-based manner. This work investigates the stability of Mach 10 air flow over an adiabatic flat plate in chemical non-equilibrium and in frozen conditions, analyzing the effect of diffusion by varying the Schmidt number. Air chemistry was observed to be destabilizing, due to the associated wall-cooling. The results also suggest that flows are most unstable when the Schmidt number is of order 0.01, meaning that the molecular diffusion rate is 100 times faster than that associated to viscous diffusion. The thermodynamic and transport models used for the base-flow quantities were observed to have a much larger impact on the stability characteristics than those used for the perturbations.
