A unified partial pressure field and velocity decomposition approach toward improved energetic aerodynamic force decompositions

Drag decomposition through energy and exergy-based methods has been shown to have a variety of advantages. One of these is identifying and quantifying the recoverable energy within a flow field. This describes the available energy that can be used to produce thrust through systems such as boundary layer ingestion. Another advantage highlighted from prior work is that the velocity decomposition approach can split the flow field into its isentropic and non-isentropic contributions. This provides region-specific formulations for drag assessment, wherein the isentropic field is associated with contributions originating from the bulk flow and the non-isentropic field with the shear layer. This paper aims to assess the performance of a modified form of the velocity decomposition approach for transonic flows. This modification involves unification with partial pressure field analysis, which provides better flow field separability due to the added decomposition of the pressure field.