Three-Dimensional Numerical Analysis of Droplet-Shock Interaction with Phase Change

The mission and flight trajectory of hypersonic vehicles often involves traversing through rain, hail, snow and clouds of ice particles, all broadly classified as hydrometeors. Their detrimental effects on the vehicle are predominant during take-off or landing. The main goal of this study is to augment our fundamental understanding of aerobreakup evolution and rain droplets evaporation approaching the transient shocked flowfield, all influenced by the effects of hydrometeors on the hypersonic projectiles in flight. The effects of weather on hypersonic flights that disrupt the vehicle’s flowfield and damage vehicle’s surface upon impact is rather poorly understood. Novel component design and materials that are resilient to the hydrometers’ impact are essential to the building of next generation hypersonic flights. However, the factors that are crucial for estimating the impact on the vehicle’s surface such as droplet deformation progression and the resultant complex transient flowfield around droplets before impact are topics of active research. In this study, a single isolated droplet is impacted by a supersonic and hypersonic planar shockwave. The droplet’s simultaneous breakup and evaporation is studied using high-fidelity numerical simulation methods such as Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) and Diffuse Interface Method considering phase change in two and three-component system. The hydrodynamic instabilities and droplet deformations are compared between experimental and computational and evaporation effects on mass-loss are thoroughly investigated.