This study is devoted to the analysis of supersonic reactive shear flows and, in particular,compressible mixing layers that can develop inside the ramjet and scramjet engines.Appropriate numerical methods have been implemented and tested to achieve the developmentof a massively parallel numerical solver, called CREAMS (compressible reactivemulti-species solver). This tool was designed to conduct high-precision numerical simulations(direct numerical simulations or DNS) of such flows. Particular attention waspaid to the description of the molecular transport terms and chemical source terms toconsider the most accurate physical description of reactive gas mixtures at high velocity,in which the chemical and mixing time scales, corresponding to the smallest scalesof the flow, are susceptible to be of the same order of magnitude. Simulations of twoandthree-dimensional, inert and reactive, mixing layers confirm the importance of theeffects associated with compressibility and rate of heat release. The results obtained differin some points from other simulations which introduced simplifying assumptions such astemporal development, use of a global chemistry or a simplified description of the moleculartransport terms. Nevertheless, they reproduce some trends already observed in severalexperimental studies conducted under similar conditions.
