Propagation characteristics of compression waves reflected from the open end of a duct

The present study addresses the distortion of the compression wave reflected from an open end of a shock tube. An experiment is carried out using the simple shock tube with an open end. Computational work is also performed to represent the experimented flows. The second-order Total Variation Diminishing scheme is employed to numerically solve the unsteady, axisymmetric, inviscid, compressible governing equations. Both the experimented and predicted results are in good agreement. The generation and development mechanisms of the compression wave, which is reflected from the open end of the shock tube, are obtained in detail from the present computations. The effect of size of the baffle plate at the open-end that causes the reflection of the incident expansion wave is found negligible. A good correlation is obtained for transition of the reflected compression wave to a shock wave inside the tube. The present data show that for a given wave length of the incident expansion wave the transition of the reflected compression wave to a shock wave can be predicted with good accuracy.