An Efficient Implementation of an Improved HLLC-Type Scheme to GPU-Accelerated Simulation of Hypersonic Thermochemical Nonequilibrium Flows

The thermochemical nonequilibrium effect refers to the complicated physical and chemical processes of gas during hypersonic flights. The surrounding gas is heated to a very high temperature. The properties of gas change due to the high temperature, thus leading to the thermochemical nonequilibrium effect. The thermochemical nonequilibrium effect is critical for hypersonic aerodynamic design and optimization. Possibility of graphics processor units (GPUs) parallel computation technique for the simulation of hypersonic flows is also demonstrated. To cure the shock instability in the simulation of hypersonic thermochemical nonequilibrium flows, a shock-stable HLLC-type scheme is introduced. A ELECTRE cone test case is conducted in NVIDIA GTX Titan Black GPU to validate the accuracy and efficiency of this proposed GPU accelerated thermochemical nonequilibrium solver. Numerical result demonstrates that the simulation time is greatly shortened and the accuracy of hypersonic flows is improved.