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Chemistry similarity in turbulent hypersonic boundary layers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 August 2025

Donatella Passiatore Open the ORCID record for Donatella Passiatore [Opens in a new window]  and
Mario Di Renzo Open the ORCID record for Mario Di Renzo [Opens in a new window]
Donatella Passiatore*
Affiliation:
Department of Engineering for Innovation, Universitá del Salento, Lecce, Italy
Mario Di Renzo
Affiliation:
Department of Engineering for Innovation, Universitá del Salento, Lecce, Italy
*
Corresponding author: Donatella Passiatore, donatella.passiatore@unisalento.it
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Abstract

This study examines the similarity properties of hypersonic turbulent boundary layers using direct numerical simulations within a two-species mixture, composed of molecular and atomic oxygen. A dissociation–recombination mechanism is considered, at varying reaction rates. The results show that while the hydrodynamic field remains largely unaffected by changes in reaction rates, temperature profiles are slightly altered, with faster reactions leading to lower temperature peaks. The chemical mechanisms significantly influence the wall heat flux, with frozen chemistry overestimating the flux. The reference simulations are compared with companion calculations, where chemical reactions are activated downstream within the fully turbulent region. These calculations represent set-ups in which the computational domain effectively starts with an inflow in a fully turbulent state, where hydrodynamic and thermal quantities are accurately described at the boundary and the chemical inflow profile is derived from a frozen-chemistry assumption. In this set-up, chemical source terms rapidly relax towards the baseline downstream of the chemistry activation location. This behaviour is due to an approximate global self-similarity shown by the chemical species transport in the fully turbulent region. Unlike laminar boundary layers where streamwise fluxes are relevant, source terms are balanced only by wall-normal transport in the turbulent region. A chemical relaxation length scale is introduced to collapse the results of all mechanisms.

JFM classification

Compressible Flows: Compressible boundary layers Compressible Flows: Hypersonic Flow Reacting Flows: Turbulent reacting flows

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Type
JFM Papers
Information
Journal of Fluid Mechanics , Volume 1016 , 10 August 2025 , A61
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© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press

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