Petascale Computing of the Asymptotic Behavior of Laminar Boundary Layer-Shock Interactions using Kinetic, Particle Simulations

Deborah Levin, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Usage Details

The specic research problems that we wish to apply the SUGAR DSMC code to are the 3-D simulations of shock-shock and shock-boundary interactions from moderate Mach number (~7-15) flows over double-wedges and double cones. Both of these geometries exhibit the Edney Type V strong shock interactions. The conditions for the cases of interest for these two configurations are in the continuum regime and the flow over the geometries involves multiple length scales and large density gradient. In fact, the density increases about 20 times in the vicinity of the transmission shock for the double wedge geometry.

We have recently simulated an even more computationally challenging flow over a double wedge using 625 nodes, with 24 billion particles and 2.15 billion computational cells on Blue Waters. This simulation really demonstrated the unique capability of our code to tackle very high-density compressible flows using the DSMC method and was presented by a graduate student in the group, Mr. Saurabh Sawant at the 2017 AIAA Aviation and Aeronautics meeting in Denver, Co. which will be a signicant part of his Ph.D thesis work and is ready to submit as a journal publication. Furthermore, because this flow is unsteady, our future calculations on Blue Waters will enable us to continue our use of global linear stability analyses to understand the different excitation and decaying eigenmodes as well as the nature of the disturbance in terms of acoustic, entropy, or vortical waves. Finally, very recent results of flow over a double cone at a Reynolds' number of 375,000m^-1 suggest that the DSMC simulations have reached a condition where transition from laminar to turbulent flow has occurred. To confirm this, we need to perform simulations on Blue Waters for a Reynolds' number of a factor of ten higher.