Expansion Fan

Application ID: 42841


An important and interesting phenomenon with supersonic flows are expansion fans, which take place when the flow encounters a convex or expansion corner. The direction of the flow changes smoothly across the fan, while the Mach number increases.

This 2D example models an expansion fan where the flow is inviscid, and the results are compared with inviscid compressible flow theory. An adaptive mesh is used to resolve the expansion region more finely than the rest of the modeling domain.

Results correlate well with those conducted using inviscid compressible flow theory.

This model example illustrates applications of this type that would nominally be built using the following products: