Pressure-Velocity Coupling in Transpiration Cooling

Abstract

Transpiration cooling is an active thermal protection system of increasing interest in aerospace applications wherein a coolant is effused through a porous wall into a hot external flow. The present work focuses on the interaction between the high-temperature turbulent boundary layer and the pressure-driven coolant flow through the porous wall. Coupling functions were obtained from pore-network simulations to characterize the flow through the porous medium. These were then coupled to direct numerical simulations of a turbulent boundary layer over a massively-cooled flat plate. Two different types of coupling function were used: linear expressions, which do not account for flow interactions between neighbouring pores, and shallow convolutional neural networks (CNN) which incorporate spatial correlations. All coupled cases demonstrated a significant variation in blowing due to the streamwise variation in mean pressure associated with the onset of coolant injection. This trend was reflected in the cooling effectiveness, and was mitigated in the CNN-coupled cases due to the incorporation of lateral flow between neighbouring pores. The distribution of turbulent kinetic energy (TKE) in the coupled cases was also modified by the coupling due to the competing effects of near-wall turbulence attenuation and increased shear due to increasing blowing ratio. Finally, the coupling was shown to impact the power spectral density of the pressure fluctuations at the wall within the transpiration region, attenuating the largest scales of the turbulence whilst leaving the smaller scales relatively unaffected.