Numerical Study of Spherical and Cylindrical Shock Wave Focusing

Abstract

A large amount of energy is associated with shock waves. Current work studies the flow parameters upon exposure to cylindrical and spherical shock focusing. Shock wave is allowed to focus by traversing through a confined converging section attached to a shock tube. The shock tube is having 2 m driver and 6 m driven section. Numerical simulations were carried out using commercially available software ANSYS-Fluent. 2-D Planar and 2-D Axisymmetric models were simulated in order to obtain cylindrical and spherical shock wave focusing effect. The shock wave with increased strength is found to accelerate inside the converging section. Moreover, during focusing, spherical shock is observed to have more acceleration in comparison to cylindrical shock. A detailed study of spherical shock focusing with real gas effects was added in the numerical simulations. 47% reduction in the maximum temperature is observed with inclusion of real gas effects.