Effect of interaction strength on recovery downstream of incident shock interactions

Direct numerical simulations of a supersonic turbulent boundary layer on a flat plate interacting with an impinging shock wave are carried out with two different incident shock angles at Mach 2.25. The effect of the interaction strength on the recovery process in the downstream region is systematically studied, including the turbulence evolution, the statistical and structural properties of wall pressure fluctuations, and the generation of mean skin friction and wall heat flux. The variations of the Reynolds stress components, the anisotropy tensor, and the turbulent kinetic energy budget in the two flow cases highlight a slow reversal tendency and an increasingly pronounced importance of the outer-layer large-scale structures in the relaxation region of the strong interaction. We find that the effect of increasing the interaction strength on the fluctuating wall pressure is reflected by a decrease in the characteristic frequencies, an increase in the spatial extent, and a decrease in the convection velocity. We decompose the mean skin friction and wall heat flux into different physically informed contributions and reveal that the mean wall heat flux generation is the same regardless of the interaction strength; in contrast, the generation mechanism of mean skin friction is found to be fundamentally changed. A novel scale-decomposition method is used to quantify the effect of the increased interaction strength on the leading components, and it is demonstrated that the energetic outer-layer large-scale structures are the dominant contributor in the recovery process as the interaction strength is increased.