Effect of transport modeling on hypersonic cooled wall boundary layer stability

Abstract

Boundary layer transition to turbulence on blunt entry/reentry vehicles leads to increased heating and additional thermal protection system weight. The boundary layers on the blunt face contain large temperature gradients which require the modeling of complex multi-species flows including detailed transport models and non-equilibrium chemistry. In this work, the sensitivity of stability characteristics to different transport and thermodynamic models is investigated. The flat plate boundary layer is used as a model problem using representative temperature profiles and Mach numbers for temperature ranges without dissociation. It is shown that the stability characteristics, both linear and transient growth, are sensitive to the models used for calculating the transport and thermodynamic properties.