Visual Study of Transient Flows in a Supersonic MHD Generator

摘要

The purpose of the present paper is to report the results of visual studies of the transient flow in a supersonic Faraday type MHD generator. The plasma for an MHD generator is produced using a shock tunnel. The color schlieren method has been employed to observed the transient flow induced in an MHD channel by the impinging of the shock front. The experimental results show clearly oblique shock waves and Prandtl-Meyer fans from edges of electrodes, and it is shown that, with an increase in the Lorentz force, the flow Mach number in a channel decreases and the shock wave changes its shape from an X type to a λ one.