A transonic small-disturbance model for the propagation of weak shock waves in heterogeneous gases

Abstract

The interaction of weak shock waves with small heterogeneities in gaseous media is studied. It is first shown that various linear theories proposed for this problem lead to pathological breakdowns or singularities in the solution near the wavefront and necessarily fail to describe this interaction. Then, a nonlinear small-disturbance model is developed. The nonlinear theory is uniformly valid and accounts for the competition between the near-sonic speed of the wavefront and the small variations of vorticity and sound speed in the heterogeneous media. This model is an extension of the transonic small-disturbance problem, with additional terms accounting for slight variations in the media. The model is used to analyse the propagation of the sonic-boom shock wave through the turbulent atmospheric boundary layer. It is found that, in this instance, the nonlinear model accounts for the observed behaviour. Various deterministic examples of interaction phenomena demonstrate good agreement with available experimental data and explain the main observed phenomena in Crow (1969).