This volume contains selected presentations of the IUTAM Symposium on 'Combustion in Supersonic Flows' held in Poitiers at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Mécanique et d'Aérotechnique (ENSMA) from 2 to 6 October 1995.
The presentations focus on four main topics related to combustion in supersonic streams and practical issues relevant to the development of new propulsion systems: fundamental studies of premixed and unpremixed combustion, fluid dynamics aspects of supersonic combustion, practical systems including Scramjet, Ramaccelerators and Pulsed Detonation Engines, and the application of detonation to propulsion.
Important progress has been made in the understanding of local mechanisms which allow combustion to be stabilized in a supersonic flow; in particular, various mechanisms controlled by mixing, chemical kinetics, viscous heating and shock waves are now well identified. Despite the difficulty of developing experimental work on supersonic combustion, a good set of experimental data is now available, allowing validation of theoretical analysis and models. The main aspects of modelling of turbulent combustion in high speed flows were discussed, including the influence of turbulent fluctuations on the chemistry-controlled phase of combustion and the applicability of flamelet models to high speed flows. The full range of numerical approaches is covered including Direct Numerical Simulation, Large Eddy Simulation, k-epsilon and shock tracking methods. A considerable effort has been made to generalize these methods to the treatment of supersonic reactive flows and to develop new numerical methods taking into account the most recent theoretical work and a better understanding of the underlying physics.