Experimental and numerical investigations of shock - Obstacle interaction

Two different approaches were undertaken in order to investigate the interaction of shock waves with circular cylinder: an experimental approach in which experiments were conducted in a shock tube, equipped with a schlieren based optical system to monitor the wave propagation; and a numerical approach where an in-house computer code was used to simulate similar problems. The incident shock wave Mach number was varied from 1.1-1.4. Very good agreement was found between the simulation and the experiments in terms of the resulted shock patterns; even though the simulation scheme was based on Euler formulatipn. To quantify the comparison between the two approaches, the shock waves trajectories and triple point trajectories were compared. In additional, the normalization of the shock trajectories that reflected from the obstacle at different Mach numbers was found.