EXPERIMENTS ON TRANSVERSE IONIZING MHD SHOCK WAVES,

Abstract

The jump conditions across a transverse ionizing MHD shock wave, where the magnetic field is in the plane of the shock, are examined. The simple conservation laws, in conjunction with Maxwell's laws and the equation of a state, yield three jump equations in four unknowns. The ionizing wave, then, requires an additional descriptive relationship for a unique solution to the jump equations to exist. Several theories which attempt to supply this missing relationship are examined including the theory of Lyubimov and Kulikovskii and later, Chu, where the internal structure of the shock, itself, supplies the missing relationship. In particular, Lyubimov and Kulikovskii show, for appropriate ratios of the thermal diffusivity to the magnetic diffusivity, that for low speed shock waves the magnetic field compression across the shock is unity and the jump equations reduce to the ordinary Rankine-Hugoniot relations. For high speed shock waves, the magnetic field compression is equal to the gas compression across the wave, and the jump equations became exactly the magnetohydrodynamic jump relations. Furthermore, intermediate speed shocks experience a magnetic field compression between 1 and rho sub 2/rho sub 1. (Author)

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
May 01, 1967
Accession Number
AD0654013

Entities

People

  • Charles F. Stebbins

Organizations

  • United States Air Force Academy

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Compression
  • Diffusivity
  • Equations
  • Magnetic Fields
  • Mathematics
  • Shock
  • Shock Waves
  • Thermal Diffusivity
  • Transverse
  • Waves

Readers

  • Combustion Dynamics and Shock Wave Physics.
  • Finite Element Method (FEM) for solving Partial Differential Equations (PDEs)
  • Plasma Physics.