Hypersonic Flow over a Cylinder with a Nanosecond Pulse Electrical Discharge

A computational study of Mach 5 airflow over a cylinder with a dielectric barrier discharge actuator was performed. The actuator was pulsed at nanosecond time scales and it rapidly added thermal energy to the flow, creating a shock wave that traveled away from the pulse source. As the shock wave traveled upstream, it interacted with the standing bow shock, and temporarily increased the bow shock standoff distance. This phenomenon was also observed experimentally through phase-locked schlieren photography. This paper aims to reproduce flow phenomena observed in the experiment using high-fidelity computations in order to provide additional insight into the shock-shock interaction, and subsequent effect on the cylinder, through a reduced-order phenomenological model of the actuator. A three-dimensional simulation of the experiment was able to accurately capture the complex cylinder/tunnel-sidewall interaction, and to replicate the changes in the flow produced by the nanosecond dielectric barrier discharge. The results show that the device was very effective at moving the standing bow shock for a minimal energy budget.