On the role of bulk viscosity in compressible reactive shear layer developments

Despite 150 years of research after the reference work of Stokes, it should be acknowledged that some confusion still remains in the literature regarding the importance of bulk viscosity effects in flows of both academic and practical interests. On the one hand, it can be readily shown that the neglection of bulk viscosity (i.e., κ=0) is strictly exact for mono-atomic gases. The corresponding bulk viscosity effects are also unlikely to alter the flowfield dynamics provided that the ratio of the shear viscosity μ to the bulk viscosity κ remains sufficiently large. On the other hand, for polyatomic gases, the scattered available experimental and numerical data show that it is certainly not zero and actually often far from negligible. Therefore, since the ratio κ∕μ can display significant variations and may reach very large values (it can exceed thirty for dihydrogen), it remains unclear to what extent the neglection of κ holds. The purpose of the present study is thus to analyze the mechanisms through which bulk viscosity and associated processes may alter a canonical turbulent flow. In this context, we perform direct numerical simulations (DNS) of spatially-developing compressible non-reactive and reactive hydrogen–air shear layers interacting with an oblique shock wave. The corresponding flowfield is of special interest for various reactive high-speed flow applications, e.g., scramjets. The corresponding computations either neglect the influence of bulk viscosity (κ=0) or take it into consideration by evaluating its value using the EGlib library. The qualitative inspection of the results obtained for two-dimensional cases in either the presence or the absence of bulk viscosity effects shows that the local and instantaneous structure of the mixing layer may be deeply altered when taking bulk viscosity into account. This contrasts with some mean statistical quantities, e.g., the vorticity thickness growth rate, which do not exhibit any significant sensitivity to the bulk viscosity. Enstrophy, Reynolds stress components, and turbulent kinetic energy (TKE) budgets are then evaluated from three-dimensional reactive simulations. Slight modifications are put into evidence on the energy transfer and dissipation contributions. From the obtained results, one may expect that refined large-eddy simulations (LES) may be rather sensitive to the consideration of bulk viscosity, while Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) simulations, which are based on statistical averages, are not.