Laboratory exercise - Compressible flow, oblique shock waves

Sammanfattning: When studying to become an engineer the education is mainly theoretical and to confirm the theory laboratory exercises are incorporated in the curriculum. Being able to visualize the phenomenons studied helps in giving the students a deeper understanding. The purpose of this report is to aid the department of fluid mechanics at KTH in designing an experiment to help the students understand the theory of oblique shock waves. The project is divided in two parts. Part one the design of the wedge and base plate and part two the creation of the actual experiment and lab PM. The design of the wedge is quite simple. It is a sharp wedge with two angles measured from the horizontal plane, 8° at the top and 4° at the bottom, this is so that two measurements can be made per experiment. Writing the PM and the design of the exercise is the main part of this project. The result is a laboratory exercise where the students compare the flow around a wedge in a shock tube for three different Mach numbers, subsonic, transonic and supersonic. Using shadowgraph optics and a high speed camera the image of the shock is captured. The different regimes are then discussed and compared with the help of theoretical calculations and the measured values.