Experimental and Numerical Investigation of the Growth of an Air/SF6 Turbulent Mixing Zone in a Shock Tube

Abstract

Shock-induced mixing experiments have been conducted in a vertical shock tube of 130 mm square cross section located at ISAE. A shock wave traveling at Mach 1.2 in air hits a geometrically disturbed interface separating air and SF6, a gas five times heavier than air, filling a chamber of length L up to the end of the shock tube. Both gases are initially separated by a 0.5 μm thick nitrocellulose membrane maintained parallel to the shock front by two wire grids: an upper one with mesh spacing equal to either ms = 1.8 mm or 12.1 mm, and a lower one with a mesh spacing equal to ml = 1 mm. Weak dependence of the mixing zone growth after reshock (interaction of the mixing zone with the shock wave reflected from the top end of the test chamber) with respect to L and ms is observed despite a clear imprint of the mesh spacing ms in the schlieren images. Numerical simulations representative of these configurations are conducted: the simulations successfully replicate the experimentally observed weak dependence on L, but are unable to show the experimentally observed independence with respect to ms while matching the morphological features of the schlieren pictures.