We study the dynamics of the gas flow discontinuities after pulse ionization of a half space in front of a flat shock wave moving in a channel. Pulse volumetric electric discharge initiated in the vicinity of the shock concentrates in front of the shock and heats the gas there. The heating is shown to be very rapid. We use the shadow imaging technique and a high speed camera to study the flow pattern evolution after the discharge. The pattern consists of two shocks separated by a contact surface. This structure corresponds to the classical Riemann problem formulation. Based on the observed pattern, we estimate the amount of discharge energy converted to heat during the discharge time: the rate of temperature increase is in the order of several degrees K per nanosecond.
Schlieren, shadowgraph and other types of refraction-based techniques have been often used to study gas flow structures. They can capture strong density gradients, such as shock waves. Shock wave detection is a very important task in analyzing unsteady gas flows. High-speed imaging systems, including high-speed cameras, are widely used to record large arrays of shadowgraph images. To process large datasets of the high-speed shadowgraph images and automatically detect shock waves, convective plumes and other gas flow structures, two computer software systems based on the edge detection and machine learning with convolutional neural networks (CNN) were developed. The edge-detection software utilizes image filtering, noise removing, background image subtraction in the frequency domain and edge detection based on the Canny algorithm. The machine learning software is based on CNN. We developed two neural networks working together. The first one classifies the image dataset and finds images with shock waves. The other CNN solves the regression task and defines shock wave position (single number) based on image pixels tensor (3-D array of numbers) for each image. The supervised learning code based on example input-output pairs was developed to train models. It was shown, that the machine learning approach gives better results in shock wave detection accuracy, especially for low-quality images with a strong noise level. Software system for automated shadowgraph images processing and x-t curves of the shock wave and convective plume movement plotting was developed.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.