Numerical Study of Supersonic Cavity Flows with Different Turbulent Models

A numerical study of supersonic cavity flows is conducted with different turbulent models, including RANS, LES, DES, DDES, and IDDES. Firstly, a supersonic cavity-ramp flow with Ma∞ = 2.92 is simulated numerically. It shows that the results of DDES and IDDES are nearly equivalent. The wall skin-friction coefficients obtained by these two models are in better agreement with the experimental measurement than those of DES. The reason is that the RANS region of DDES and IDDES is larger than that of DES, so it produces more turbulence in the near-wall region. In comparison, RANS cannot accurately predict large separation flows. The shear layer’s reattachment point on the ramp predicted by RANS is biased downstream compared to the experimental measurement, making its overall prediction accuracy worse than other models. The results obtained by LES are comparable to those obtained by DDES and IDDES except for the wall skin-friction coefficient, which is much smaller because the grid resolution is not high enough to accurately resolve the near-wall turbulent flow. Secondly, the effect of different aft-wall angles (θ) on the flow characteristics of the supersonic cavity is investigated numerically with IDDES. We find that as θ decreases, the oscillation intensity of the cavity flow continuously decreases. However, the change in cavity drag with θ is non-monotonic, which means that there might be a critical θ at which the drag penalties of a cavity are minimal. Therefore, an optimal design should be achieved when changing θ to control the oscillation intensity of supersonic cavity flows.