The Rankine–Hugoniot conditions, also referred to as Rankine–Hugoniot jump conditions or Rankine–Hugoniot relations, relate to the behaviour of shock waves traveling normal to the prevailing flow. They are named in recognition of the work carried out by Scottish engineer and physicist William John Macquorn Rankine[1] and French engineer Pierre Henri Hugoniot.[2] See also Salas (2006)[3] for some historical background.
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Consider a one-dimensional, calorically ideal gas described by a polytropic equation-of-state and operating under adiabatic conditions. In addition, assume that the fluid is inviscid (negligible viscosity effects). Such a system can be described by the following system of conservation laws, known as the 1D Euler equations
where,
For adiabatic conditions a polytropic process can be represented by the equation-of-state,
where represents the polytropic exponent (equal to the ratio of specific heats ) of the polytropic process
For an extensive list of compressible flow equations, etc., refer to NACA Report 1135 (1953).[4]
Note: For a calorically ideal gas is a constant and for a thermally ideal gas is a function of temperature.
Before proceeding further it is necessary to introduce the concept of a jump condition – a condition that holds at a discontinuity or abrupt change.
Consider a 1D situation where there is a jump in the scalar conserved physical quantity , which is governed by the hyperbolic conservation law
Let the solution exhibit a jump (or shock) at and integrate over the partial domain, , where and ,
The subscripts 1 and 2 indicate conditions just upstream and just downstream of the jump respectively. Note, to arrive at equation (8) we have used the fact that and .
Now, let and , when we have and , and in the limit
where we have defined (the system characteristic or shock speed), which by simple division is given by
Equation (9) represents the jump condition for conservation equation (6). A shock situation arises in a system where its characteristics intersect, and under these conditions a requirement for a unique single-valued solution is that the solution should satisfy the admissibility condition or entropy condition. For physically real applications this means that the solution should satisfy the Lax entropy condition
where and represent characteristic speeds at upstream and downstream conditions respectively.
In the case of the hyperbolic conservation equation (6), we have seen that the shock speed can be obtained by simple division. However, for the 1D Euler equations ( 1), ( 2) and ( 3), we have the vector state variable and the jump conditions become
Equations (12), (13) and (14) are known as the Rankine–Hugoniot conditions for the Euler equations and are derived by enforcing the conservation laws in integral form over a control volume that includes the shock. For this situation cannot be obtained by simple division. However, it can be shown by transforming the problem to a moving co-ordinate system, i.e. , and some algebraic manipulation, that the shock speed is given by
where is the speed of sound in the fluid at upstream conditions.
See Laney (1998),[5] LeVeque (2002),[6] Toro (1999),[7] Wesseling (2001),[8] and Whitham (1999)[9] for further discussion.
For a stationary shock , and for the 1D Euler equations we have
In view of equation (12) we can simplify equation (14) to
which is a statement of Bernoulli's principle, under conditions where gravitational effects can be neglected.
Substituting and from equations (12) and (13) into equation (15) yields the following relationship:
where represents specific enthalpy of the fluid. Eliminating internal energy in equation (15) by use of the equation-of-state, equation ( 4), yields
From physical considerations it is clear that both the upstream and downstream pressures must be positive, and this imposes an upper limit on the density ratio in equations (17) and (18) such that . As the strength of the shock increases, there is a corresponding increase in downstream gas temperature, but the density ratio approaches a finite limit: 4 for an ideal monatomic gas and 6 for an ideal diatomic gas . Note: air is comprised predominately of diatomic molecules and therefore at standard conditions .