TABLE OF CONTENTS Before engineers can reliably design devices to survive flight through or into an atmosphere at hypersonic speeds, they must somehow provide for, avoid, or otherwise accommodate the enormous heat-transfer rates to the vehicle engendered by such flight speeds.
William H. Dorrance, 1962
Reflecting on the old phrase everything but the kitchen sink, in this chapter we have everything including the kitchen sink. Here, the kitchen sink is the inclusion of the viscous effects of viscosity, thermal diffusion, and mass diffusion in chemically reacting flows. Question: How do we calculate the heat transfer to a surface from a chemically reacting flowfield? This question is answered in the present chapter. Indeed, it is the major thrust of this chapter. Do you think the answer is different for nonequilibrium and nonequilibrium flows? Does the catalytic state of the surface make any difference? How do the viscous effects change the local chemical composition in a hightemperature flow? To find out, simply read on. This chapter is the pinnacle of our study of high-temperature gas dynamics. Climb to the top, and enjoy the view.
The quotation by W. H. Dorrance on p. 711, an authoritative aerodynamicist and well-known author of a book on hypersonic viscous flow [195], clearly states one of the strongest forces that drives an interest in chemically reacting viscous flows, namely, the need to accurately predict and deal with the aerodynamic heating to hypersonic bodies. This motivation was a strong impetus behind our viscous-flow discussion in...
