Hypersonic flow onto a large curved wedge and the dissipation of shock wave

Abstract

For supersonic flow past an obstacle, experiments show that the flow field after shocks changes slightly for incoming flow with Mach number larger to 5, named hypersonic flow. Hypersonic similarity principle was first found by Qian for thin wedge by studying potential flow. In this paper, we explore the existence of smooth flow field after shock for hypersonic potential flow past a curved smooth wedge with neither smallness assumption on the height of the wedge nor that it is a BV perturbation of a line. The asymptotic behaviour of the shock is also analysed. We proved that for given Bernoulli constant of the incoming flow, there exists a sufficient large constant such that if the Mach number of the incoming flow is larger than it, then there exists a global shock wave attached to the tip of the wedge together with a smooth flow field between it and the wedge. The state of the flow after shock is in a neighbourhood of a curve that is determined by the wedge and the density of the incoming flow. If the slope of the wedge has a positive limit as $x$ goes to infinity, then the slope of the shock tends to that of the self-similar case that the same incoming flow past a straight wedge with slope of the limit. Specifically, we demonstrate that if the slope of the wedge is parallel to the incoming flow at infinity, then the strength of the shock will attenuate to zero at infinity. The restrictions on the surface of a wedge have been greatly relaxed compared to the previous works on supersonic flow past wedges. The method employed in this paper is characteristic decomposition, and the existence of the solution is obtained by finding an invariant domain of the solution based on geometry structures of the governing equations. The idea and the method used here may be helpful for other problems.