Investigations of the Aerodynamic Characteristics of the Shock Tubes : (Part 1, The Effects of Tube Diameter on the Tube Performance)

Abstract

The effects of tube diameter on the propagation behavior of a shock front were investigated by using two shock tubes with different sizes and by comparing with the other data. The process of the formation of a shock front when the diaphragm was ruptured was observed by schlieren method. From this experiment, it was found that the observed shock Mach numbers were larger than the values obtained by the simple theory. Such result depends on the opening time of the diaphragm and the diameter of the tube. Therefore, the various factors influencing the opening time of the diaphragm and the shock formation distance were discussed and the functional relations between these factors were clarified using the dimensional analysis. The expression for the shock formation distance derived by the dimensional analysis was in satisfactory agreement with the experimental results.