When you think of shock waves, I would wager that you picture a supersonic jet zooming past overhead. Or maybe you have experienced the famous (or infamous) “sonic boom” that accompanies shock waves attached to airplane engines. The engineering challenges associated with the often-troublesome behavior of shock waves is present in all scales, from carefully designing the bodywork of the aforementioned fighter jets, to the equally intricate details of flow passages and blade design in turbomachinery. The first step in taking into account the effect of shock waves is to understand what they are. In this post we will be reviewing a short introduction into what shock waves are and a few applications where they might be relevant.

What are shock waves?
Shockwaves are non-isentropic pressure perturbations of finite amplitude and from the second law of thermodynamics we can say that shockwaves only form when the Mach number of the flow is larger than 1. We can distinguish between normal shocks and oblique shocks. In normal shocks, total temperature is constant across the shock, total pressure decreases and static temperature and pressure both increase. Across oblique shocks, flow direction changes in addition to pressure rise and velocity decrease. Read More