THE EFFECT OF SWEEP-ANGLE VARIATION ON THE TURBULENCE STRUCTURE IN HIGH SPEED TURBULENT REACTIVE FLOWS

The relevance of quantifying heat release and compressibility effects in turbulent compressible spatially developing shear flows using detailed kinetics as well as detailed multicomponent transport description is of important relevance in the operation of supersonic air-breathing engines, whose efficiency closely depends on the molecular mixing between oxidizer and fuel. The present study is devoted to investigated how the variation of a single parameter applied at the inlet, namely the sweeping (or skewness) angle, affects the turbulence structure and the evolution of the flow in a compressible and multi-component inert and reacting mixing layers using detailed chemistry and multicomponent transport. The preliminary computations indicate that the transitional region and the fully developed turbulence region depends strongly on the degree of flow sweeping at the inlet. The qualitative inspection of the results indicates the sweeping angle tends to increase more quickly the growth of the inlet structures, leading therefore to an enhancement the development of the mixing region. This is confirmed with the time-averaged statistics that characterize the mixing layer development. One possible perspective of the present work concerns flow control of mixing layer setup and reliable comparison between experiment, simulations and turbulence modelling.