Manned Spacecraft Design Principles

Appendix A

Hypersonic Aerodynamics

Abstract

The technical foundation for hypersonic flight back and forth across the atmosphere as used and discussed in the main text is presented here including normal and oblique shocks, small disturbance theory, Prandtl–Meyer flow, Newtonian theory, and conical flow, among others.

Keywords

Normal shock waves, oblique shock waves, Newtonian flow, conical flow, small disturbance theory

A.1 One-Dimensional Flow Relations

Let us consider the high-speed flow of a gas under the simplest condition of steady ($\partial /\partial t=0$) one-dimensional ($\overrightarrow{V}=u(x)\hat{i}$) flow. In this flow, we assume the gas is frictionless (μ=0), nonconducting ...