Acceleration of a sphere behind planar shock waves

The paper presents the results of an investigation on the motion of a spherical particle in a shock tube flow. A shock tube facility was used for studying the acceleration of a sphere by an incident shock wave. Using different optical methods and performing experiments in two different shock tubes, the trajectory and velocity of a spherical particle were measured. Based upon these results and simple one-dimensional calculations, the drag coefficient of a sphere and shading effect of sphere interaction with a shock tube flow were studied.