Review of Rarefied Gas Effects in Hypersonic Applications Eswar Josyula and Jonathan Burt U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, USA
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[email protected] ABSTRACT Rarefied gas phenomena are found in a wide variety of hypersonic flow applications, and accurate characterization of such phenomena is often desired for engineering design and analysis. In atmospheric flows involving high Mach numbers and/or low densities, underlying assumptions in a continuum fluid dynamics description tend to break down, and distributions of both molecule velocity and internal energy modes can depart significantly from equilibrium. In this paper, characteristics of rarefied and nonequilibrium gas flows are discussed, and several numerical methods for rarefied flow simulation are outlined. A variety of hypersonic flow applications are presented, and additional discussion is provided for directions of current and future research. 1.0 INTRODUCTION The field of rarefied gas dynamics is concerned with gas flow problems that do not conform to a continuum description; in particular, flows for which the Knudsen number – defined as the ratio of the mean free path to some characteristic length – is greater than that required to approximate the flow as a continuous medium. The mean free path is in turn defined as the average distance, typically in a reference frame which moves with the flow, that a molecule travels before colliding with another molecule. Traditional continuum gas dynamics models tend to break down due to gradient transport assumptions for diffusion terms in continuum equations of mass, momentum, and energy conservation. More generally, in a rarefied flow, the effect of intermolecular collisions to drive the distribution of molecular velocities toward the equilibrium limit (called a Maxwellian velocity distribution) is insufficient to maintain a near- equilibrium distribution.