Review of Rarefied Gas Effects in Hypersonic Applications.

摘要

Rarefied gas phenomena are found in a wide variety of hypersonic flow applications, and accurate characterization of such phenomena is often desired for engineering design and analysis. In atmospheric flows involving high Mach numbers and/or low densities, underlying assumptions in a continuum fluid dynamics description tend to break down, and distributions of both molecule velocity and internal energy modes can depart significantly from equilibrium. In this paper, characteristics of rarefied and nonequilibrium gas flows are discussed, and several numerical methods for rarefied flow simulation are outlined. A variety of hypersonic flow applications are presented, and additional discussion is provided for directions of current and future research.