On air-chemistry reduction for hypersonic external flow applications

In external hypersonic flows, viscous and compressibility effects generate very high temperatures leading to significant chemical reactions among air constituents. Therefore, hypersonic flow computations require coupled calculations of flow and chemistry. Accurate and efficient computations of air-chemistry kinetics are of much importance for many practical applications but calculations accounting for detailed chemical kinetics can be prohibitively expensive. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of applying chemical kinetics reduction schemes for hypersonic air-chemistry. We consider two chemical kinetics sets appropriate for three different temperature ranges: 2500 K to 4500 K; 4500 K to 9000 K; and above 9000 K. By demonstrating the existence of the so-called the slow manifold in each of the chemistry sets, we show that judicious chemical kinetics reduction leading to significant computational savings is possible without much loss in accuracy.