Stability of a supersonic boundary layer with heat supply to a narrow band of the layer

The paper presents a study of a supersonic boundary layer while heat supply to the layer’s narrow internal region. Calculations were performed for a flow with Mach number M = 2 and the dimensionless temperature (normalized to the temperature at a layer boundary edge Tw = 3.9 (630 K). It was demonstrated that heat supply causes a twofold increase in the 2D disturbance increments, while the frequency range expands by factor of three with a heat-insulated plate (zero heat input) taken as a reference. For a heated plate (with Tw = 3.9), the heat input into this layer delays the disturbance growth; that is, this facilitates the boundary layer stabilization and the disturbance increments reduce by almost four times. Along with 2D waves, the oblique waves were investigated in this paper. It was found that for low-frequency disturbance, we observe an intense growth of 3D (oblique) waves. Meanwhile, 2D disturbances enhance for a high-frequency range. These facts comply with the numerous data on boundary layer stability. However, these factors for boundary layer stability become less significant in the case of heat input to the supersonic boundary layer (compared with the zero heat input). The study also observes the longitudinal structures with a downstream decay. The heat supply makes these structures decrement lower in the supersonic boundary layer (meaning a slower decay). The results for the study of boundary layer disturbance are compared to similar data for the flow with M ≪ 1.