A good understanding of turbulent compressible flows is essential to the design and operation of high-speed vehicles. Such flows occur, for example, in the external flow over the surfaces of supersonic aircraft, and in the internal flow through the engines. Our ability to predict the aerodynamic lift, drag, propulsion and maneuverability of high-speed vehicles is crucially dependent on our knowledge of turbulent shear layers, and our understanding of their behavior in the presence of shock waves and regions of changing pressure. Turbulent Shear Layers in Supersonic Flow provides a comprehensive introduction to the field, and helps provide a basis for future work in this area. Wherever possible we use the available experimental work, and the results from numerical simulations to illustrate and develop a physical understanding of turbulent compressible flows.

Measurements of mean flow profiles at several streamwise locations in a supersonic turbulent boundary layer growing under a continuous adverse pressure gradient are reported. Tests were performed at a freestream Mach number of 3, for an adiabatic wall, using two curved ramps designed to produce constant pressure gradient flows. The velocity profile data, when transformed to incompressible coordinates, are in good agreement with Coles universal 'wall-wake' velocity profile and they indicate that the boundary layer is in local equilibrium and essentially independent of upstream history. In addition, the Coles wake parameters and Clauser shape factors, characterizing the transformed profiles, are in accord with the results of low speed correlations of adverse pressure gradient flows. The turbulent transport terms were extracted from the mean flow field data and indicate that for a given ramp, the profile of turbulent shear stress normalized by the wall shear, versus distance from the surface, normalized by the local boundary thickness, is severely distored by the pressure gradient although it is apparently insensitive to local conditions.