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The response of a pitot tube in the presence of a weak shock wave
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2016
Extract
This note is concerned with the response of a pitot tube in the region of its interaction with a weak shock wave. It will be helpful if we distinguish immediately between our usage of the terms ‘pitot pressure’ and ‘normal shock recovery pressure’. We use the former to mean the experimental reading obtained from a pitot tube and the latter to mean the theoretical stagnation pressure downstream of a normal shock at the Mach number of a point in the flow.
Across an oblique shock, the normal shock recovery pressure changes discontinuously. However, in the course of a recent study of the impingement of supersonic jets on flat plates, the authors noticed that, as a pitot probe was traversed across a weak shock wave, not only was the discontinuity smoothed out by the finite size of the probe but also values of pitot pressure were obtained which were larger than the higher of the two values of normal shock recovery pressure.
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- Copyright © Royal Aeronautical Society 1976
Footnotes
Now Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, University of Southampton.
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