High-speed jet-in-crossflow (JICF) configurations are central to several aerospace applications, including turbine-blade film cooling, thrust vectoring, and fuel or hydrogen injection in combusting or reacting flows. This study employs high-fidelity direct numerical simulations (DNS) to investigate the dynamics of a supersonic jet (Mach 3.73) interacting with a subsonic crossflow (Mach 0.8) at low Reynolds numbers. Three momentum-flux ratios (J = 2.8, 5.6, and 10.2) are considered, capturing a broad range of jet–crossflow interaction regimes. Turbulent inflow conditions are generated using the Dynamic Multiscale Approach (DMA), ensuring physically consistent boundary-layer turbulence and accurate representation of jet–crossflow interactions. Modal decomposition via proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) and spectral POD (SPOD) is used to identify the dominant spatial and spectral features of the flow. Across the three configurations, near-wall mean shear enhances small-scale turbulence, while increasing J intensifies jet penetration and vortex dynamics, producing broadband spectral gains. Downstream of the jet injection, the spectra broadly preserve the expected standard pressure and velocity scaling across the frequency range, except at high frequencies. POD reveals coherent vortical structures associated with shear-layer roll-up, jet flapping, and counter-rotating vortex pair (CVP) formation, with increasing spatial organization at higher momentum ratios. Further, POD reveals a shift in dominant structures: shear-layer roll-up governs the leading mode at high J, whereas CVP and jet–wall interactions dominate at lower J. Spectral POD identifies global plume oscillations whose Strouhal number rises with J, reflecting a transition from slow, wall-controlled flapping to faster, jet-dominated dynamics. Overall, the results demonstrate that the momentum-flux ratio (J) regulates not only jet penetration and mixing but also the hierarchy and characteristic frequencies of coherent vortical, thermal, and pressure and acoustic structures. The predominance of shear-layer roll-up over counter-rotating vortex pair (CVP) dynamics at high J, the systematic upward shift of plume-oscillation frequencies, and the strong analogy with low-frequency shock–boundary-layer interaction (SBLI) dynamics collectively provide new mechanistic insight into the unsteady behavior of supersonic jet-in-crossflow flows.
Roy et al. (2026) studied this question.