A critical review of scramjet combustion simulation

A review of scramjet combustion simulation is provided in this paper. The topics covered include the fundamental problem of supersonic mixing layers, high-speed combustion modeling efforts, and actual calculations of realistic scramjet combustors. The review shows that the RANS approach dominates the turbulence modeling of the system, with only a handful of LES work. Also, virtually all the numerical works are based on low-order schemes, and the combustion models that have been used for realistic simulations solve the species evolution equations with assumed PDF closures, although there seems to be a growing use of the flamelet methods. Spray modeling for scramjet combustion has not received enough attention.