Nonequilibrium High Temperature Boundary Layers around Bodies of Revolution

Abstract

In this paper, efficient and accurate hermitian type multi-point finite difference methods are used to develop a general boundary layer code for analyzing reacting flows around bodies of revolution.The main motivation is the investigation of the influence of different physico-chemical models for transport properties,chemical kinetics and finite rate wall catalysis, on relevant quantities such as wall heat transfer and skin friction. The effect of wall catalysis is especially important in the study of properties of thermal protection materials, for which a boundary layer code is a very useful tool, because it allows the computation of the heat flux at a cost that is a fraction of a Navier-Stokes computation. Computations performed on different test cases show the ability of the code to cope with a wide range of nonequilibrium conditions, making it a useful tool for physico-chemical studies.