Volker Elling, Tai-Ping Liu: Physicality of Weak Prandtl-Meyer Reflection

Volker Elling, Tai-Ping Liu

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Abstract

Consider supersonic flow around a ramp. There are two possible shock reflections, the weak and strong Prandtl-Meyer reflection. Experimentally, it is the weak reflection that is observed. The purpose of this article is to present recent analytical formulations and computational results on this problem. Through numerical computations, we show that the usual time-asymptotic stability criterion fails to rule out the strong reflection. Instead, we consider the self-similar flows, the time-asymptotic states of general flows.