Direct Numerical Simulation of a Mach 2 shock interacting with isotropic turbulence

Abstract

Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) and linear analysis of a shock interacting with incompressible and compressible isotropic turbulence is conducted. A dependence of amplification ratios on the degree of compressibility of the incoming flow is found. It can be shown that the enhancement of rms values of turbulent quantities across the shock varies according to the ratio of compressible to incompressible kinetic energy ϰ (exact definition see eq. 8). Inflow conditions with high values of ϰ display reduced amplification ratios of TKE and thermodynamic quantities while vorticity fluctuations are enhanced more strongly. The different behaviour of the turbulent kinetic energy (TKE) is due to the reduced pressure diffusion term in the TKE-equation. Experiments show qualitatively a similar behaviour as the simulation with incompressible inflow conditions, but they could so far not confirm our findings of reduced amplification rates in the compressible case, one of the reasons being the lack of knowledge of all flow parameters upstream of the shock front and the inability to generate isotropic turbulence in real life experiments. For the DNS we use a third order in space shock-capturing scheme based on the ENO algorithm of Harten [10] together with an approximate Riemann solver. This non-TVD scheme turned out to have many advantages over other common Godunov-type high resolution schemes for the specific problem of a shock interacting with turbulent fields.