UK taking physics and looking to study aero eng.

[Saoist]

hello all, I'm new here...an A-level student in the UK taking physics and looking to study aero eng. that's my profile atm.

to topic...obviously when a supersonic flow travels through a normal shock it reduces to subsonic, but which is the cause and which is the effect? apparently the shock forms due to combined pressure waves (from constructive interference from supersonic, sonic, and subsonic regions) forming a large wavefront.

so from that, you could argue that the flow slows down and the shock forms as a result of that. rather than the shock slowing down the flow.

i may be arguing semantics here. or i might be wrong.

 

[Clausius2]

to topic...obviously when a supersonic flow travels through a normal shock it reduces to subsonic, but which is the cause and which is the effect? apparently the shock forms due to combined pressure waves (from constructive interference from supersonic, sonic, and subsonic regions) forming a large wavefront.

so from that, you could argue that the flow slows down and the shock forms as a result of that. rather than the shock slowing down the flow.
.

Welcome to PF.

In order to look for the cause and the effect, you may as well to imagine an unsteady process. Imagine there is an stream of supersonic flow everywhere. Imagine you instantaneously put an obstacle (such as an airplane nose) in the stream. Fluid particles traveling downstream will find suddenly a solid surface, crashing into it and causing a rising in local pressure. This pressure wave will try to travel upstream, but it is impossible because its proper wave speed is smaller than the convective fluid velocity. Once the steady state is reached against, in each time you will find a zone of crowded of particles behind the wave, which makes the downstream traveling particles to crash into this "traffic jam" and become slowered down.

So the logical secquence is:

I) the shock is formed by means of a solid surface submerged in a supersonic stream

II) the shock and the great density behind it slows down the fluid once it has passed trough the shock, which by the way has a thickness of the order of the inverse of the Reynolds number.

 

[ravenprp]

Hello and welcome to the community! As a fellow physics student, it's great to see your interest in aero engineering. It's definitely a challenging but rewarding field.

To answer your question, the cause and effect of a supersonic flow transitioning to subsonic through a shock wave can be a bit tricky to understand. In simple terms, the shock wave is caused by the sudden decrease in velocity of the supersonic flow. This decrease in velocity is a result of the flow encountering a sudden increase in pressure, which leads to the formation of the shock wave.

So, in a sense, you could say that the shock wave is the cause and the decrease in velocity is the effect. However, it's also important to note that the shock wave itself is formed due to the interaction of pressure waves as you mentioned. So, it's not entirely wrong to say that the flow slows down and the shock forms as a result of that.

Ultimately, it's a combination of both factors that lead to the formation of a shock wave and the transition from supersonic to subsonic flow. I hope this helps clarify things for you. Keep up the great work in your studies and best of luck with your future endeavors in aero engineering!