Analysis of Normal Shock Waves in Particle Laden Gas

The internal structure of a normal shock wave in a perfect gas heavily laden with particles having a distribution of sizes is machine computed by numerical integration. The results of a small-perturbation analysis for weak shock waves and one particle size compare well with the machine-computed results for these restricted conditions. Both methods indicate that the thickness of weak shock waves increases in proportion to the particle size squared and inversely with the shock strength. For conditions typical of solid propellant-rocket motor exhaust streams the computed shock-wave thickness is several inches. With such computed results both the amount and the size distribution of suspended particles can be found individually from shock-wave measurements.