The project investigates roughness and separation phenomena in hypersonic boundary-layer flows in the light of chemical reactions and non-equilibrium effects. Four PhD candidates are foreseen to work on different aspects of the numerical investigation by means of state-of-the-art computer codes on high-performance computers (HPC). One aspect will be the investigation of the transitional behaviour of separation bubbles at ramps in reacting flows with non-equilibrium effects. These flows are typically present in slender bodies, engine intakes (e.g. SCRAM jet configurations) and at control surfaces. The second part of the project will deal with the role of roughness in blunt body high-enthalpy flows in re-entry scenarios. Roughness-induced transition from laminar to turbulent flow shall be systematically examined in the presence of high-temperature gas effects like dissociation and non-equilibrium.
Another part of the project will be the investigation of the role of the free stream composition (a thermochemical effect) and free stream acoustic disturbances on the transition location on blunt bodies. This is crucial in understanding the discrepancy between wind-tunnel investigations and free-flight experiments which are substantial in high Mach number flows. The final part consists of the advancement of the employed computer code to higher performance on emerging HPC systems and the incorporation of GPU capabilities in the research codes as GPU computing becomes more and more popular and efficient in HPC environments.