Over Forty Years of Continuous Research at UTIAS on Nonstationary Flows and ShockWaves

摘要

Analytical and experimental research on nonstationary shock waves, rarefactionwaves, and contact surfaces was conducted continuously at University of Toronto, Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS) since its inception in 1948. Some unique facilities were used to study the properties of planar, cylindrical, and spherical shock waves and their interactions. Investigations were also performed on shock-wave structure and boundary layers in ionizing argon, water-vapor condensation in rarefaction waves, magneto-gasdynamic flows, and the regions of regular and various types of Mach reflections of oblique shock waves. Explosively driven implosions were employed as drivers for projectile launchers and shock tubes, and as a means of producing industrial-type diamonds from graphite, and fusion plasmas in deuterium. The effects of sonic-boom on humans, animals, and structures have also formed an important part of the investigations. More recently, interest has focussed on shock waves in dusty gases, the viscous and vibrational structure of weak spherical blast waves in air, and oblique shock-wave reflections. In all of these studies instrumentation and computational methods have played a very important role. A brief survey of this work is given herein and in more detail in the relevant references.