Effects of roughness on hypersonic boundary-layer transition

The effect of roughness on hypersonic boundary-layer transition has been studied for three primary purposes: to trip a laminar layer to turbulence, to determine whether naturally occurring roughness is expected to cause early transition, and to determine the largest allowable roughness that will not affect the location of transition. Roughness is often divided into two classes: isolated roughness, in which each protuberance can be considered separately, and distributed roughness similar to sandpaper, in which the roughness elements are many and are not considered separately. The effects of roughness on hypersonic transition are reviewed, considering the physics of the process, known parametric effects, some of the common correlations, and a few case studies. The three or more modes by which roughness can affect transition are outlined. At hypersonic edge Mach nunbers, it requires very large roughness heights to affect transition. Various correlations are often used to estimate the effect of roughness; several of these are described, although none provide good agreement with all the data.