An Automated Design Optimization Tool for Electromagnetic Control of Hypersonic Flow

This STTR Phase II project proposes to develop an automated design optimization tool for electromagnetic flow control based on the gas-kinetic BGK-Burnett scheme and the discrete adjoint optimization method. The adjoint method has already proved successful for dealing with both transonic aerodynamic shape and aero-structural optimization problems and has been extensively tested with the Euler equations on multiblock structured meshes in a parallel environment and with the Navier-Stokes equations on unstructured meshes. However, the ionization of air occurs at high altitude and high speed, where the rarefaction effects are not negligible. So, the continuum Euler/Navier-Stokes flow solvers used in the previous adjoint method are not well suitable for hypersonic MHD flow control applications. One needs to select a flow solver which at least covers the range of Knudsen number, a key measure of the rarefaction effects, up to one. This prompts ZONA to propose a gas-kinetic CFD solver, BGK-Burnett, for use in an adjoint method for hypersonic MHD flow control applications. The solver is unconditionally stable for all Knudsen numbers and is able to cover both the continuum and transitional flow regimes.