Experimental Shock-Initiated Combustion of a Spherical Density Inhomogeneity

Abstract

A planar shock wave that impulsively accelerates a spherical density inhomogeneity baroclinically deposits vorticity and enhances the mixing between the two fluids resulting in a complex, turbulent flow field. This is known as the classical shockbubble interaction (SBI) and has been a topic of study for several decades [1,2,3,4, 5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12], and closely related the Richtmyer-Meshkov instability (RMI) [13, 14]. While the classical SBI problem concerns a reactively neutral bubble, the present experimental study is the first of its kind in which a spherical bubble filled with a stoichiometric mixture of H2 and O2 diluted with Xe is accelerated by a planar shock wave (1.35 < M < 2.85) in ambient N2, and will be referred to as reactive shock-bubble interaction (RSBI).