Shock waves at a fast-slow gas interface

This paper presents the results of experiments on plane shock waves refracting at air/SF6 and He/CO2 interfaces. These are called fast-slow gas combinations because the speed of sound in the incident shock gas is greater than that in the transmitting shock gas. Our work was based on a generalization of the von Neumann (1943) classification of shocks into two classes called weak and strong. We introduced two subclasses of each of these, giving in all four groups of phenomena for study. This is possibly an exhaustive list, at least for conditions where the gases are approximately perfect. We present data on all four groups and study various transition conditions both within and across the groups. Our results appear to conflict with a previously reported irregular refraction; in fact we could apparently completely suppress this wave system by attention to our gas purity and boundary conditions. In its place we found a different system which appears to be a new phenomenon. We found another new system which has the appearance of a Mach-reflexion type of refraction but with its shock dispersed into a band of wavelets. It is interesting that the wavelets remain intense enough to induce identifiable vortex sheets in the flow. Finally we found yet another refraction of the Mach-reflexion type which had no detectable vortex sheet emanating from the triple point: such a system was foreshadowed by von Neumann.