Dense Gas Flow in Minimum Length Nozzles

Abstract

Recently, dense gases have been investigated for many engineering applications such as for turbomachinery and wind tunnels. Supersonic nozzle design can be complicated by nonclassical dense-gas behavior in the transonic flow regime. In this paper, a method of characteristics (MOC) is developed for two-dimensional (planar) and axisymmetric flow of a van der Waals gas. A minimum length nozzle design code is developed that employs the MOC procedure to generate an inviscid wall contour. The van der Waals results are compared to perfect gas results to show the real-gas effects on the flow properties and inviscid wall contours.