Rotational relaxation of nitrogen in a viscous shock layer at low reynolds numbers

Abstract

The viscous shock-layer model is used to examine relaxation of rotational degrees of freedom of molecular nitrogen in flow of a rarefied gas near the stagnation flow line around a sphere. It is shown that in the strongly smeared shock-wave region the rotational degrees of freedom can exhibit substantial nonequilibrium, leading to the increase of temperature and an increase of shock-layer thickness as compared with the equilibrium values. The influence of rotational relaxation on the shock-wave structure is discussed, and boundaries are found for the flow regions when rotational relaxation plays on important role,A comparison is made between the results of numerical calculations and experimentally obtained density profiles available in the literature near the stagnation line in flow of a rarefied gas over a sphere [1, 2]. Quite good agreement is obtained between the results of the calculation and experimental data over a wide range of Reynolds numbers.