Numerical Investigation of Subsonic and Supersonic Asymmetric Vortical Flow

Abstract

The high angle of attack flow about a slender body in supersonic and subsonic flow was computed for an angle of attack of 38.5 deg to study the phenomena associated with vortex asymmetry. A laminar thin-layer Navier-Stokes algorithm was used to determine whether vortex asymmetry in numerical computations is the result of a numerically induced perturbation or a property of the governing equations. The fully upwind code used in this study was symmetric in the crossflow plane to 12 orders of magnitude, the level of roundoff error on the Cray Y-MP. With a completely symmetric grid and algorithm with respect to the crossflow plane, a bump was needed to perturb the flow to asymmetry