High-Speed Shock/Droplet Aerobreakup Using a Sharp Interface Method

High-speed droplet aerobreakup has been the focus of numerous experimental and numerical investigations due to its application in hypersonic aircraft development. This paper presents a preliminary mesh convergence study for fully 3D droplet aerobreakup simulations behind a steady normal shock of Mach numbers 5.12 and 3.03 using the open-source multiphase compressible flow solver from the NGA2 CFD framework (https://github.com/desjardi/NGA2). Primary droplet mass and displacement from simulation data is compared to previously published experimental and numerical results as well as previously developed empirical models. This work starts preliminary verification activities and provides the foundation for future work using the NGA2 solver to study the droplet aerobreakup problem.