Acoustic Tracking of Supersonic Objects
Conclusions Nonequilibrium, multicomponent air calculations for electron-density distributions in the stagnation point, merged viscous shock layer have been presented using a shock-slip analysis in conjunction with a coupled, iterative finitedifference numerical solution. The present study yielded four main conclusions summarized as follows: 1) Including of shock-slip effects are necessary for analysis of merged viscous-layer electron density using a thin viscous shock-layer model. Such a shock-slip approach appears to be valid based on comparison with solutions which include details of the shock structure. 2) Predicted electron-density distributions are relatively insensitive to choice of diffusion model (constant Lewis-Semenov number for all species vs full multicomponent diffusion). 3) For an equilibrium catalytic-wall condition, a factor of four maximum difference in peak electron density resulted from the four different sets of reaction rates used in the present study. The catalytic condition of the wall influences the entire shock layer with the principal effect concentrated in the near-wall region. 4) Decoupled calculations in which the species concentrations are solved for using frozen-flow fluid-dynamic solutions appear to overpredict the electron density as compared to coupled calculations such as that of Dellinger3 and the present work.