Manufacturing and Instrumentation of an Open End Compressed Air Shock Tube

Shock tubes have been used extensively to study shock wave structures and high speed flow features. The purpose of constructing this open end shock tube was to have the ability to produce shock waves in a laboratory setting but also understand the exit flow coming out which can be applied to future studies that are beyond the scope of this work. This undertaking would require that an open end shock tube be built and instrumented with PCB Integrated Circuit Piezoelectric (ICP) Pressure Sensor Model 113B24 that would then be connected to a PCB Model 482C05 Signal Conditioner with the purpose of measuring the the pressure jumps as well as the speed of the shock wave. The data was acquired using National Instruments NI PXIe-1071 chassis with a PXI 1088 Embedded Controller as well as three PXI 5114 digitizer cards with the Virtual Instrument coded using LabView. The data was written to a text file that was then transferred to MATLAB for post processing using a Savitzy-Golay filter to clean up the signal noise. The shock tube was driven using compressed air and a diaphragm burst was achieved through spontaneous rupture of a 0.003 Mylar diaphragm. The open shock tube built for this undertaking fits in a lab space and successfully produces a shock wave that propagates down the tube that exits at the open end to reproduce a blast wave. Additionally the available pressure sensors and DAQ were integrated into the shock tube to measure the different predicted shock structures in each run. The experimental runs at the exit of the shock tube demonstrate the expected exit flow features, but a flow visualization is necessary to get a better understanding of the exit flo