Numerical investigation of lateral jet interaction effects in rarefied transition flow regime

A parallel DSMC method is presented for accuratly predicting the effects of lateral jet interaction with rarefied atmosphere of transition flow. A hybrid grid structure with Cartesian coordinate meshes and surface unstructured triangular cells is developed with collision cells adaptation and used in the DSMC computation. A static random load balancing technique is applied in the parallel DSMC code using the MPI parallel environment. For the computation of lateral jet interaction of three-dimensional plat plate model with different pressure ratios, the results of surface separation distance show good agreement with low density wind tunnel experiment to validate the DSMC algorithm. The supersonic and hypersonic RCS jet interaction with hypersonic rarefied incoming flow on a slender blunt double-cone in rarefied transition flow regime are investigated. The impacts of flight altitude, free stream velocity, angle of attack and jet thrust on plume-atmosphere interaction flow fields and aerodynamic properties are numerically analyzed. The influences of parameter distributions with uniform/non-uniform of nozzle exit on the seperation distance and votex structure near the jet are simulated in detail.