Particle/Shock Interaction for the BOLT-II Flight Experiment

During hypersonic flight, atmospheric particulates can impinge on the vehicle bow shock, cross the shock layer, and impinge on the boundary layer. All of these particle/flow field interactions generate acoustic noise in the flow field, which can excite unstable modes in the boundary layer and trip transition to turbulence. This work compares a Particle-Source-In-Cell (PSIC) method and a volume-resolved method to determine the efficacy of using the PSIC method to model a particle crossing a shock for a BOLT-II flight condition. Results show that the zero-volume nature of the PSIC method under-resolves the particle-induced flow field features needed to predict the resultant shock motion and acoustic disturbances. An overset method is proposed to resolve particle-induced flow field features at the particle length scale. Adaptations to low-dissipation numerical methods are proposed for use with the overset method. The proposed method is extensible to realistic geometries such as BOLT-II when coupled with improved interpolation methods and overset grid motion.