Computation of weakly ionized hypersonic flows in thermochemical nonequilibrium

A numerical method to compute a two-dimensional hypersonic flowfield that is weakly ionized and in thermochemical nonequilibrium has been developed. Such a flowfield is described by coupled partial differential equations for the conservation of species mass, mass-averaged momentum, vibrational energy of each diatomic species, electron energy, and total energy. The steady-state solution to these fully coupled equations has been obtained for a gas composed of seven chemical species and characterized by six temperatures using an implicit Gauss-Seidel line relaxation technique. The computed electron number densities in the flowfield of a sphere cone compare well with experimental results.