At hypersonic speeds, complexities occur when the gases interact with the surface of the vehicle, such as boundary layers and shock waves. Researchers in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at The Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, were able to observe new disturbances in simulations conducted for the first time in 3D.
The study, “Loss of axial symmetry in hypersonic flows over conical shapes,” is published in Physical Review Fluids.
Fully 3D simulations require a great deal of processing power, making the work expensive to compute. Two things made it possible for Deborah Levin and her Ph.D. student Irmak Taylan Karpuzcu to conduct the research: Time on Frontera, the leadership-class computer system at the Texas Advanced Computing Center and software developed in previous years by several of Levin’s former graduate students.