Shock tube simulation

Shock Tubes:

An interesting thing found which makes engineering easy. The sound barrier was one of the main problems to break in early 1960s. When they found out about the drag divergence mach number the problem got solved and reached supersonic area. But there arises a question about study of shock waves and patterns. Lack of proper data lead to some disasters in aerospace industry. There comes the shock tunnel with proper nozzle and inlet setup. The two different pressure zones were separated by a thin diaphragm which inturn opens up and the flow moves from high pressure area to low pressure area. This sudden outburst makes the flow to move at higher velocities which created shock patterns and shock reflections. This shock tunnel is vital in hypersonic flights as well as the study of shock patterns.

The diamond shaped shock pattern is an important area of study which helps us in describing the difference between the usage of sharp nose in fighter jets and blunt nose in space shuttles. There is a lot of applications using shock tube and a simulation based on this concept is done and documented below. The Shock tube used here has no inlet or otlet and its mainly based on pressure difference and a diaphragm between it.

Observations:

The cell count varies as we have used adaptive mesh refinement. This variation is according to the flow took place after the break of diaphragm which lead to shock wave patterns.

The temperatue and pressure is getting changed accordig to the moving shock phenomena. As per the shock movement the pressure and temperature gets varied.

The diamond shaped shock wave formed is animated above.