Radial Flow Without Swirl Between Parallel Disks Having Both Supersonic and Subsonic Regions

A theoretical and experimental study is made of turbulent radial flow between parallel disks with choked conditions at the channel inlet. Supersonic flow is found to exist for some distance downstream of the inlet to a point in the channel where a quasi-normal shock causes the flow to become subsonic. A numerical solution is obtained for the radial pressure distribution and the location of the shock region. Agreement with experiment is good as shown both by comparison with the pressure distribution and by flow visualization. When the square inlet corner was preceded by a chamfered section, the mass flows required to choke were increased and approached the one-dimensional predictions.