Computational Fluid Dynamics

CFD analysis of a supersonic inlet and a shock tube

Supersonic Inlet

Here are two projects I worked on that highlight my experience with CFD. The first project focuses on the CFD simulation of the NASA 1507 supersonic inlet—a Mach 3, axisymmetric-spike, mixed compression inlet. ANSYS Fluent was used for the analysis. The charts show the Mach contours of the supersonic inlet at design and off-design conditions.

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Sod Shock Tube

It is imperative to understand the inner workings of CFD codes. This project aims to solve the famous Sod Shock Tube problem using the Steger-Warming scheme with the MUSCL formalism. Feel free to take a look at the repository and play with the code yourself.

A shock tube is a long pipe, which is divided into a driver section and a driven section by a diaphragm. The driver section is pressurized with an inert gas, and the driven section contains the test gas mixture that is under experimental investigation. Following the rupture of the diaphragm, a normal shock develops which propagates into the driven section and is reflected at the end wall. The results validate the model developed for this test case.

The GIF above shows the evolution of the pressure wave in the shock tube over time. The picture on the right shows the snapshot of this GIF. I wrote the solver code in C and then used that data to develop these charts in MATLAB. This project taught me the reasonings behind the many decisions made during computational analysis of complex systems.