  The simulation of hypersonic flows is computationally demanding due to large
gradients of the flow variables caused by strong shock waves and thick boundary
or shear layers. The resolution of those gradients imposes the use of extremely
small cells in the respective regions. Taking turbulence into account
intensives the variation in scales even more. Furthermore, hypersonic flows
have been shown to be extremely grid sensitive. For the simulation of
three-dimensional configurations of engineering applications, this results in a
huge amount of cells and prohibitive computational time. Therefore, modern
adaptive techniques can provide a gain with respect to computational costs and
accuracy, allowing the generation of locally highly resolved flow regions where
they are needed and retaining an otherwise smooth distribution. An h-adaptive
technique based on wavelets is employed for the solution of hypersonic flows.
The compressible Reynolds averaged Navier-Stokes equations are solved using a
differential Reynolds stress turbulence model, well suited to predict
shock-wave-boundary-layer interactions in high enthalpy flows. Two test cases
are considered: a compression corner and a scramjet intake. The compression
corner is a classical test case in hypersonic flow investigations because it
poses a shock-wave-turbulent-boundary-layer interaction problem. The adaptive
procedure is applied to a two-dimensional confguration as validation. The
scramjet intake is firstly computed in two dimensions. Subsequently a
three-dimensional geometry is considered. Both test cases are validated with
experimental data and compared to non-adaptive computations. The results show
that the use of an adaptive technique for hypersonic turbulent flows at high
enthalpy conditions can strongly improve the performance in terms of memory and
CPU time while at the same time maintaining the required accuracy of the
results.
