Abstract

If we wish to design a commercial aircraft to fly faster than sound we are faced with the problem of decelerating the incoming supersonic flow to a subsonic flow that our engine turbomachinery can handle. We are forced to achieve this using shock waves. These shock waves will impinge on the boundary layers forming on the walls of our inlet, and as a result, complex shock wave boundary layer interactions (SBLIs) will occur. These SBL Is can separate the flows in our inlets with consequences ranging from drops in engine efficiency to catastrophic unstart of the inlet. We lack a good understanding of what can influence the scale of separations in these interactions. In this talk we will take the ideally two-dimensional example of the compression corner SBLI , and examine though wind tunnel experiments how real world geometries, taking the example of rectangular cross sectioned ducts, can induce complex three dimensional effects, and we will seek to find explanations for these so called ‘sidewall effects’.