Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-nmvwc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-05T15:38:11.595Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

On the unsteady expansion of a gas into a near vacuum

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 March 2006

R. E. Grundy
R. E. Grundy
Affiliation:
Applied Mathematics Department, University of St Andrews, Fife, Scotland
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This note intends to clarify the way in which the expansion of an initially uniform gas into an ambient atmosphere degenerates into an expansion into a perfect vacuum. The starting-point is a paper by Greenspan & Butler (1962) in which certain tentative remarks are made reprding this question. We show that the flow consists of an infinite-strength contact front coinciding with the gasvacuum interface of the perfect-vacuum expansion, driving an infinite-strength shock into the vacuum ahead of it. The ga,s-vacuum interface and the shock are separated a t all times even though the density of the gas through which the shock travels vanishes in the vacuum limit.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Fluid Mechanics , Volume 56 , Issue 1 , 14 November 1972 , pp. 97 - 100
Copyright
© 1972 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Freeman, N. C. 1965 In Research Frontiers in Fluid Dynamics (ed. R. J. Seeger & G. Temple), pp. 284–307. Interscience.
Greenspan, H. P. & Butler, D. S. 1962 J. Fluid Mech. 13, 101.
Taylor, G. I. 1946 Proc. Roy. Soc. A 186, 273.