Vibration dissociation coupling in nonequilibrium flows

Abstract

The final report on research between North Carolina State University and the NASA Ames Research Center is presented. The research was aimed at using the Schwartz, Slawsky, Herzfeld (SSH) theory to simulate the vibrational relaxation of nitrogen molecules undergoing dissociation or recombination over a wide range of conditions. The results of these simulations were then treated as exact, and they were used to develop a model for the coupled vibration-dissociation process. This new model is simple enough to be used in computational fluid dynamics codes, but still captures the physics of the complex process. The model is used to simulate the flow over typical geometries to test it and to determine how much impact it has on the flow field. The key elements of this research are summarized.