An Experimental Study of Underexpanded Moist Air Jet Impinging on a Flat Plate

When a gas expands through a convergent nozzle in which the ratio of the ambient to the stagnation pressures is higher than that of the critical one, the issuing jet from the nozzle is underexpanded. If a flat plate is placed normal to the jet at a certain distance from the nozzle, a detached shock wave is formed at a region between the nozzle exit and the plate. In general, supersonic moist air jet technologies with nonequilibrium condensation are very often applied to industrial manufacturing processes. In spite of the importance in major characteristics of the supersonic moist air jets impinging to a solid body, its qualitative characteristics can not even know. In the present study, the effect of the nonequilibrium condensation on the underexpanded moist air jet impinging on a vertical flat plate is investigated experimentally. Flow visualization and impact pressure measurement are performed for various relative humidities and flat plate positions. The obtained results show the plate shock and Mach disk are dependent on the nozzle pressure ratio and the relative humidity, but for a given nozzle pressure ratio, the diameters of the plate shock and Mach disk depend on the stagnation relative humidity. The impact pressure deviation from the flow of without condensation is large, as the relative stagnation humidity increases.