Efficient high-order Discontinuous Galerkin simulations of multi-species high-enthalpy flows

Numerical simulation of hypersonic vehicles is an attractive approach to investigate the complex phenomena involved in such technologies. For this, second-order finite volume methods (FVM) are the established method in computational fluid dynamics, with the cost of high dissipation in affordable meshes, thus needing refined ones or adaptive mesh refinements techniques to obtain accurate results. An alternative is to make use of high-order discontinuous Galerkin methods, in particular discontinuous Galerkin spectral element method (DGSEM), once it achieves higher formal order of accuracy on element-local polynomial bases. Therefore the goal of this work is to present the numerical simulations of a two-dimensional scramjet configuration to test and verify the applicability of the DGSEM approach for a complex hypersonic flow where shock-shock interactions occur. Results revealed to be in agreement with reference FVM solvers, thus verifying the code implementation.