Third-order blast wave theory and its application to hypersonic flow past blunt-nosed cylinders

The inviscid flow behind a cylindrical blast wave and its analogy with hypersonic flow past blunt-nosed cylinders is considered. Sakurai (1953, 1954) obtained a solution for the flow field behind a propagating blast wave by expanding the flow variables in power series of 1/ M 2 , where M is the blast wave Mach number, and determining the coefficients of the first two terms in the series. Here the work is extended to include third-order terms. Third-order theory is shown to improve the prediction of shock wave shapes and surface pressure distribution on hemisphere-cylinder configurations at M ∞ = 7·7 and 17·18.