ENGINEERING AND CFD

Since the first official manned supersonic flight in 1947 engineers work on realizing sustained passenger travel at several times the speed of sound, at so-called hypersonic speed. Australia could be reached by plane in 4 hours from Europe. Though there is no discrete “hypersonic barrier”, this speed regime is characterized by strong surface heating due to air friction and compression. The vehicle’s skin temperature during flight depends on the state of the flow near the surface, the boundary layer. Its smooth, less heat-flux causing, low-momentum laminar state eventually ends up in the turbulent, layer-stirring state which can be prematurely triggered by surface roughness. To understand this transition to turbulence and to be able to control the flow, not least in the engine, direct numerical simulations and sophisticated stability analyses of the flow are performed on GCS supercomputers by a team of scientists from the Institute of Aerodynamics and Gas Dynamics of University of Stuttgart.