Numerical Simulation of Gas Injection Effect on Boundary Layer Instability for Space Vehicles

Abstract

In this work effect of wall normal gas injection on boundary-layer stability is investigated for the high-speed flow over two models of space vehicles—the hemispherical model and the model of Exomars project. The mean flows are obtained using numerical solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations for laminar axisymmetric flow. It was shown that the transition onset, which was experimentally observed in the boundary layer with injection, is associated with relatively small integral amplification of instability. This indicates that in the experiment laminar-turbulent transition is governed by bypass mechanisms.