Behavior of shock trains in a diverging duct

A shock train inside a diverging duct is analyzed at different pressure levels and Mach numbers. Nonreactive pressurized cold gas is used as fluid. The structure and pressure recovery inside the shock train is analyzed by means of wall pressure measurements, Schlieren images and total pressure probes. During the course of the experiments, the total pressure of the flow, the back pressure level and the Mach number upstream of the compression region have been varied. It is shown that the Reynolds number has some small effect on the shock position and length of the shock train. However, more dominant is the effect of the confinement level and Mach number. The results are compared with analytical and empirical models from the literature. It was found that the empirical pseudo-shock model from Billig and the analytical mass averaging model from Matsuo are suitable to compute the pressure gradient along the shock train and total pressure loss, respectively.