Numerical investigation of inviscid shock wave dynamics in an expansion tube

Highly complicated shock wave dynamics has been numerically calculated by solving the Euler equations for a circular shock tube suddenly expanded three times of the original tube diameter atx=0. Shock waves of different shock Mach number,M _s =1.5 and 2.0, have produced remarkably distinct blast jet structures. A planar shock wave took its final form after the blast by repeated Mach reflections of the blast wave: the first one at the wall and the second one at the central axis. The central Mach disc overtook and merged with the annular Mach stem before the planar shock wave was formed. In contrast to the blast wave which would propagate spherically in an open space, the present blast wave undergoes complex morphological transformation in the restricted flow passage, resulting in an unstable and oscillatory blast jet structure of highly rotational nature. The slipstream tube emanating from the shock tube exit corner decomposed into a chain of small vortex rings that interacted with the barrel shock of the jet, which caused periodic collapse of the jet structure. The finite volume-FCT formulation equipped with the time-dependenth-refinement adaptive unstructured triangular mesh technique in the present paper has contributed to resolution of the intricate physical discontinuities developing in the blast flow fields.