An early stage of the drop interaction with shock wave: airflow, deformation, destruction

Abstract

Abstract The work is devoted to experimental and computational modeling of the flow around water droplets behind an incident shock wave and its effect on deformation and decay. The structure of the flow near and in the wake of the drop, the evolution of the shape and breakup delay were investigated in the range of shock wave Mach numbers Ms=1.109–1.34 and Weber numbers We=200–2200. Comparison of calculations with experiments allowed constructing a phenomenological picture of the behavior of a drop in shock wave as a response to a rapidly changing flow field at an early stage of interaction.