Parallel particle simulation of the near-continuum hypersonic flows over compression ramps

Abstract

This paper describes the analysis of the near-continuum hypersonic flow over a compression ramp using the two-dimensional parallel direct simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) method. Unstructured and triangular solution-based adaptive mesh depending on the local mean free path is used to improve the resolution of solution for the flow field with highly varying properties. In addition, a freestream parameter is defined to help reduced the cell numbers in the freestream area, resulting in appreciable decrease of the computational time (20-30%) without sacrificing the accuracy of the solution. The two-step multilevel graph partition technique is used for physical domain decomposition, employing estimated particle number distribution in each cell as the graph vertex weight. 32 IBM-SP2 processors are used throughout the study unless otherwise specified. The Effect of the outflow vacuum boundary condition, compression ramp angle, freestream condition, and length of the ramp to the flow field are investigated. Computational results are compared with previous numerical results whenever available.