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Reference 2: http://nasa/2.pdf
| Rankine, was the first relevant figure who developed the theory, he makes his main contribution in his 1870 paper on the thermodynamic theory of waves published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.
- He begins with: “The object of the present investigation is to determine the relations which must exist between the laws of the elasticity of any substance, whether gaseous, liquid, or solid, and those of the wave-like propagation of a finite longitudinal disturbance in that substance.”
- Later he writes: “It is to be observed, in the first place, that no substance yet known fulfills the condition expressed by the equation  , between finite limits of disturbance, at a constant temperature, nor in a permanency of type may be possible in a wave of longitudinal disturbance there must be both change of temperature and conduction of heat during the disturbance”.
Therefore, Rankine by explaining that the shock transition is a non-adiabatic process, where the particles exchange heat with each other, but no heat is received from the outside, resolved the objections that had been raised by Rayleigh and others concerning the conservation of energy.
He goes on to find, for a perfect gas, the jump conditions for a shock wave moving with speed a into an undisturbed medium with pressure and specific volume defined respectively by P and S. |
