Investigation of Conjugate Heat Transfer in Wall-Modeled Large Eddy Simulation of High-Speed Compressible Wall-Bounded Flows

Abstract A parameter study is performed in a compressible boundary-layer at supersonic conditions to investigate the accuracy of a validated loosely-coupled Conjugate Heat Transfer (CHT) model combined with an advanced wall model approach for Large Eddy Simulation (LES). Fully-coupled CHT typically introduces extreme additional cost to numerical simulations due to large time-scale disparities between processes in the fluid and solid domains. Loosely-coupled CHT methods seek to mitigate this cost while simultaneously maintaining the correct boundary layer dynamics and local heat transfer processes. Likewise, wall-modeling makes LES more computationally tractable, but has not been widely used with CHT. The current investigation demonstrates the performance (accuracy and computational cost) of these approaches when implemented as a unified model. Results demonstrate that the selected wall-modeled LES, combined with a fully-integrated loosely-coupled CHT model, can reproduce the accuracy of reference DNS and wall-resolved LES data with orders of magnitude reduction in cost. Moreover, they demonstrate the implementation requirements necessary to achieve this accuracy.