A Numerical Approach and Study of the Shock-Wave Structure of Supersonic Jet Flow in a Nozzle

Abstract

Creating a high-quality aircraft engine is closely connected to the problem of obtaining the jet flow characteristics that appear while an aircraft’s engine is in operation. As natural experiments are costly, studying turbulent jets by numerical simulation appears practical and acute. Biconic nozzle supersonic jet flow is the research subject of this article. A compression and expansion train of waves called barrels were formed in the jet flow at preset conditions. The simulation was performed on an unstructured numerical grid. In order to enhance the calculation accuracy in the shock-wave domain, a hybrid gradient computation scheme and numerical grid static adaptation method were applied in the regions of gas-dynamic values’ significant differential. This approach resulted in a description of nozzle supersonic gas flow structure. It was shown that building local refinement when using a static adaptation numerical grid contributed to improving the accuracy of determining shock waves’ fronts. In addition, this approach facilitated the identification of the Mach disk in the flow when using an unstructured grid, allowing for calculation schemes not higher than a second-order of accuracy.

Keywords

• Navier–Stokes equations
• shock waves
• supersonic jet flow
• nozzle
• numerical grid adaptation