Role of phase distortion in nonlinear saturation of the unstable acoustic modes in a hypersonic parallel flow boundary layer

We analyze the role of the relative phasing in the nonlinear saturation of the unstable Mack modes in a hypersonic parallel flow boundary layer in two dimensions (2D). As the linearly unstable Mack modes extract energy from the mean flow, the perturbation energy cascades into higher harmonics as well as the mean flow. The higher harmonics are generated with <0.5% of total perturbation energy at steady state, indicating a very small role of higher harmonics in 2D. Additionally, the higher harmonics propagate with the same phase speed as the unstable mode, indicating wave steepening and a coherent energy cascade. The mean flow gets decelerated and heated due to the continuous extraction of the perturbation energy into traveling modes and the viscous dissipation of these modes. Unlike unstable modes in classical hydrodynamics, we show that the distortion in relative phasing between the streamwise velocity and wall-normal velocity due to nonlinear distortion of the mean flow is dominant. Using asymptotic reconstruction of the unstable eigenmodes, we compute the perturbation energy budgets in the linear and nonlinear regimes. Through energy budgets, we show that the viscous effects in the wall layer and the viscous effects in the critical layer sufficiently capture the distortion in phase due to the mean-flow distortion. We then combine this in a numerical model for calculating the steady-state perturbation energy and mean-flow distortion through the nonlinear saturation of unstable Mack modes in a hypersonic parallel flow boundary layer in 2D. Throughout, we compare the results of approximate theoretical analysis with 2D direct numerical simulations.