Active flow control for hypersonic flows involving real gas and magnetohydrodynamic effects

Abstract

Active flow control of hypersonic flight vehicle forms a crucial design requirement for hypersonic research and technology development. Aerodynamic and propulsive controls are the two main affiliates of flow control to be achieved during flight. The flight vehicle can be a projectile, a re-entry payload, a cruise missile or an air-breathing hypersonic scramjet cruise vehicle (HSCV). Active flow control of HSCV is considered the most challenging due to complexities associated with direct coupling of hypervelocity aerodynamic and propulsive flow characteristics. For successful operation and completion of mission objectives of HSCV right from launch phase to touch-down, active flow controls which utilize new multidisciplinary and evolutionary physical mechanisms, such as electromagnetic flow control and plasma discharge flow control are required during the flight. Due to the complex interaction of electromagnetic field and chemically reacting ionized flow field, the flowfield analysis needs to consider sophisticated physical and chemical models. Hence there is a need and demand to develop a multidisciplinary numerical tool, considering the pertinent multiphysics environment for addressing research and development needs as well as for analysis of various hypersonic flow control problems. In this realm, a special purpose flow solver had been developed for addressing MHD flow control of hypersonic flight vehicles involving interaction of magnetic field and thermo-chemical non-equilibrium flowfield. This is the first time in the country that such a capability had been developed.