Shock Effects on Delta Wing Vortex Breakdown

It has been observed that delta wings placed in a transonic freestream can experience a sudden movement of the vortex breakdown location as the angle of incidence is increased. The current paper uses computational fluid dynamics to examine this behavior in detail. The study shows that a shock/vortex interaction is responsible. The balance of the vortex strength and axial flow and the shock strength are examined to provide an explanation of the sensitivity of the breakdown location. Limited experimental data are available to supplement the computational fluid dynamics results in certain key respects, and the ideal synergy between computational fluid dynamics and experiments for this problem is considered. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]