2026 Sarras Hypersonic Catalytic Flow Modeling

Hypersonic flows involve extreme thermochemical non-equilibrium, where strong energy dissipation leads to tightly coupled chemical reactions, radiation, and energy exchange. In this regime, surface chemistry, particularly catalytic wall reactions, can significantly affect boundary-layer composition and surface heat transfer. Accurate simulations of such flows may require repeated evaluations of detailed thermochemical libraries, which represent a major computational bottleneck in high-fidelity reactive-flow simulations. To mitigate this cost, we employ the data-driven reduced-order framework introduced by Scherding et al. (2023), which combines nonlinear dimensionality reduction, community clustering, and local surrogate models to efficiently approximate high-dimensional thermochemical mappings. In this work, this framework is extended for the first time to hypersonic reactive flows with localized catalytic surface discontinuities, introducing sharp variations in wall chemistry and heat transfer. To address the increased complexity of the thermochemical state space, the dimensionality reduction method is enhanced with a Sammon-type stress penalty that mitigates topological folding of the latent manifold and improves the robustness of the clustering and surrogate stages. The resulting model accurately captures the effects of discontinuous catalytic properties, including sharp gradients in wall species mass fractions, diffusion fluxes, and surface heat transfer, while reducing the overall simulation cost by 50% without compromising accuracy.