TABLE OF CONTENTS In Part 1 we emphasize the purely fluid-dynamic effects of high Mach number; the complicating effects of transport phenomena (viscosity, thermal conduction, and diffusion) and high-temperature phenomena will be treated in Parts 2 and 3, respectively. In dealing with inviscid, hypersonic flow in Part 1, we are simply examining the question: what happens to the fluid dynamics of an inviscid flow when the Mach number is made very large? We will see that such an examination goes a long way toward the understanding of many practical hypersonic applications.
It is clear that the thorough study of gas-dynamic discontinuities and their structures combines in an essential way the fields of hydrodynamics, physics, and chemistry, and that there is no lack of problems which deserve attention.
Wallace D. Hayes, Princeton University, 1958
This chapter is short and sweet. Shock waves and expansion waves are ubiquitous features in supersonic and hypersonic flowfields. The detailed analysis and calculation of shock and expansion wave properties are bread-and-butter topics in the study of compressible flow. This chapter goes a step further; here, the assumption of very high Mach numbers ahead of the waves allows the rather elaborate, but exact, shock- and expansion-wave relations to be reduced to much simpler, albeit approximate, equations that hold for hypersonic flow. You might ask so what? Indeed, for an...
