Comparison between Computational and Experimental Wall-Shear Stress and Pressure Measurements in a Supersonic Wind Tunnel
We study the performance of two selected RANS models (SST-$k$-$\omega$ and Baldwin-Lomax) to simulate the mean wall-shear and pressure data obtained from a distributed-roughness-related experimental campaign conducted at Ahmic Aerospace, LLC, located in Ohio, US. A structured compressible Navier-Stokes in-house solver, DPLR, is used to conduct the RANS simulations. As the final objective is to perform the studies under high-enthalpy flow conditions, such as inside the AHF facility at NASA-Ames Research Center (ARC), the current investigation focuses on the low-enthalpy cases using Ahmic's high-Reynolds-number supersonic wind tunnel as the initial step to simplify the flow physics. Furthermore, the wind tunnel simulations are conducted with perfectly-smooth walls to further simplify the problem and perform the initial testing of different solver-based RANS models. The Baldwin-Lomax model is observed to be more accurate than the SST model. However, when these RANS models and their roughness augmentation models are utilized to study their accuracy with respect to the experimental datasets, where the roughness effects are activated, both models perform well for a low roughness height case. However, as the roughness height increases, the SST model more accurately predicts the wall data (shear and pressure) than the Baldwin-Lomax model. Therefore, this present work has built a solid foundation for selecting the best RANS model to study the wall data under high-enthalpy flow conditions at the AHF facility soon.