Influence of vibrational relaxation on perturbations in a shock layer on a plate

The influence of excitation of molecular vibrational degrees of freedom on the mean flow and perturbation development in a hypersonic (M = 6–14) viscous shock layer is studied. The layer originates on a plate placed in a flow of air, carbon dioxide, or their mixture at high stagnation temperatures (2000–3000 K). The mean flow and pressure pulsation on the surface of the plate are measured in an IT-302M pulsed wind tunnel (Khristianovich Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, Siberian Branch, Russian Academy of Sciences). Numerical simulation is carried out in terms of a model of a thermally perfect gas using the ANSYS Fluent program package based on solving nonstationary two-dimensional Navier–Stokes equations. External flow perturbations are introduced into the computational domain in the form of plane monochromatic acoustic waves using UDF modules built in the computational code. It is shown that the excitation of vibrational degrees of freedom in carbon dioxide molecules considerably influences the position of the head wave and intensifies perturbations in contrast to air in which the fraction of vibrationally excited molecules is low at the same parameters of the oncoming low. The influence of the excitation of vibrational degrees of freedom is studied both for equilibrium gas and for a vibrationally nonequilibrium gas. Nonequilibrium vibrational degrees of freedom are simulated using a two-temperature model of relaxation flows in which the time variation of the vibrational energy is described by the Landau–Teller equation with regard to a finite time of energy exchange between vibrational and translational-rotational degrees of freedom of molecules. It is found that the vibrational nonequilibrium has a damping effect on perturbations.