Receptivity of Hypersonic Boundary Layers Due to Acoustic Disturbances over Blunt Cone

The transition process induced by the interaction of acoustic disturbances in the free-stream with boundary layers over a 5-degree straight cone and a wedge with blunt tips is numerically investigated at a free-stream Mach number of 6.0. To compute the shock and the interaction of shock with the instability waves the Navier-Stokes equations are solved in axisymmetric coordinates. The governing equations are solved using the 5th -order accurate weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) scheme for space discretization and using third-order total-variation-diminishing (TVD) Runge-Kutta scheme for time integration. After the mean flow field is computed, acoustic disturbances are introduced at the outer boundary of the computational domain and unsteady simulations are performed. Generation and evolution of instability waves and the receptivity of boundary layer to slow and fast acoustic waves are investigated. The mean flow data are compared with the experimental results. The results show that the instability waves are generated near the leading edge and the non-parallel effects are stronger near the nose region for the flow over the cone than that over a wedge. It is also found that the boundary layer is much more receptive to slow acoustic wave (by almost a factor of 67) as compared to the fast wave.