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Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics,
University of Minnesota
Abstract-
Recently there has been a lot of interest in the use of plasmas to modify
supersonic flows to reduce drag and attenuate shock waves. Several
experiments have shown drag reductions of up to 50% in low Mach number
supersonic flows. At higher Mach numbers, a large increase in the
shock standoff distance was observed. In this seminar, numerical modeling
of these plasma aerodynamics experiments will be discussed to explain
these "anomalous" effects. We assess the importance of vibrational energy
excitation and storage by the gas, as well as the effects of unsteady
heating and non-uniformities in the plasma. We find that vibrational
energy storage is unlikely to play a role, but that thermal non-uniformities
may explain the experiments. A draft of the paper that describes this
work is available at
ftp://ftp.aem.umn.edu/users/candler/plasma_aero.pdf
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