A cylindrical converging shock tube for shock-interface studies

A shock tube facility for generating a cylindrical converging shock wave is developed in this work. Based on the shock dynamics theory, a specific wall profile is designed for the test section of the shock tube to transfer a planar shock into a cylindrical one. The shock front in the converging part obtained from experiment presents a perfect circular shape, which proves the feasibility and reliability of the method. The time variations of the shock strength obtained from numerical simulation, experiment, and theoretical estimation show the desired converging effect in the shock tube test section. Particular emphasis is then placed on the problem of shock-interface interaction induced by cylindrical converging shock waves. For this purpose, membrane-less gas cylinder is adopted to form the interface between two different fluids while the laser sheet technique to visualize the flow field. The result shows that it is convenient to perform such experiments in this facility.