Experimental and Numerical Study of Shock Waves in Contractions

Shock waves are often occurring during passage of supercritical flow in the non-prismatic channels. In the present study, values of height and instantaneous velocities were measured in various points of shock waves observed in two contractions with fixed convergence ratio and convergence angles of 7.6 and 21.3 degrees for four Froude Numbers (models 1 and 2). RNGk-ε and RSM turbulence models were used for 3-D simulation. The average relative errors of wave profile calculation for Fr1=7.0 using the mentioned turbulence models were 1.82% and 1.06% for the model 1, 3.46% and 2.67% for the model 2, respectively. Also, wave velocity values were 2.35% and 1.44% for the model 1, 5.75% and 3.23% for the model 2, respectively. The results showed that the RSM model performed slightly better than RNGk-ε model in simulating of shock waves.