Time and length scales of low-frequency pressure fluctuations in supersonic swept ramps
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Shock-wave/boundary-layer interactions (SBLI) are a critical aspect of high-speed aerodynamic flows, causing flow separation, turbulence amplification, and localized thermal peaks. These interactions induce low-frequency unsteadiness in the separated flow region, linked to large-amplitude wall pressure fluctuations. The inherent three-dimensionality of flow fields in aerospace applications complicates the prediction of dominant frequencies and spatial structures of these fluctuations. 'Swept' flow configurations are especially suitable for investigating SBLI, as they incorporate three-dimensional aspects, often neglected in the literature, while maintaining cylindrical symmetry with parallel separation and reattachment lines. In this work, we perform Direct Numerical Simulations (DNS) of turbulent flow with an x-projected inflow Mach number 2.9 over a 24° compression ramp. The in-house solver FLEW (Soldati et al. 2024), based on generalized curvilinear coordinates to handle the ramp geometry, is utilized for the DNS. By varying the inflow sweep angle from 0° to 30°, the study examines the impact of crossflow on the overall flow organization, focusing on the spatial structure and spectral features of the pressure fluctuations. Wavenumber-frequency spectra are used to determine the characteristic length and velocity scales of the problem. Further insights into the spatio-temporal dynamics of wall pressure fluctuations are obtained by applying Dynamic Mode Decomposition (DMD) to wall pressure snapshots, which allows the extraction of the dominant coherent structures associated with low-frequency unsteadiness. Accurately characterizing large-amplitude pressure structures is essential to assess the validity of a model recently proposed by Ceci et al. (2023). Derived from DNS of impinging SBLI, this model predicts the peak Strouhal number related to low-frequency unsteadiness in swept interactions. By leveraging DNS results and data-driven analysis, the present study seeks to determine whether the model applies to compression ramp interactions—suggesting a universal low-frequency scaling in swept SBLI—or whether a dependence on the specific geometric configuration exists.