Redistribution of transient shock waves using shock dividers

The exhaust of a pulse-detonation combustor is characterised by the emission of a high-amplitude primary shock wave and a trailing transient supersonic jet. Attenuation of this shock wave is of importance to the development of pulse-detonation combustors for use in gas turbines. One method of attenuation is to diffuse and redistribute the energy of the shock wave through the use of a shock divider, which splits the leading shock into multiple separate shocks. This paper presents an experimental investigation of three different shock divider designs. High-speed schlieren images are shown along with pressure measurements from within the divider. Static pressure is measured upstream and downstream of the divider and total pressure is measured inside the divider using a high-frequency total-pressure probe. The separation between the split shocks increases as the divider design is varied. The largest temporal separation produced at the exit of the divider was 0.06 ms. The efficiency of each design is evaluated using a metric based on pressure measurements, and was found to be 76%, 86% and 90% of the reference measurement without a divider respectively.