Concept

Nozzle — where it appears

A duct shaped to accelerate a flow, converging for subsonic flow and converging then diverging to take a gas past the speed of sound at its throat. Its exit pressure against the pressure outside decides whether the jet leaves full, expands further outside, or separates from the wall inside.

Named by 3 essays across 2 fields — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

The wall is what cancels the waves it made. The characteristic net of a minimum-length nozzle designed for Mach 2.4, with 18 waves. The pale lines run from the sharp throat down to the axis, reflect there by symmetry, and run back up to the wall; the wall turns through exactly the angle needed to cancel each one as it arrives, so nothing reflects back into the flow and the exit is uniform at Mach 2.400 and parallel to 0.0 degrees. The area ratio decides the Mach number and this net decides the shape, and the two agree on the exit height to 0.51 per cent at this resolution.

The wall that cancels its own waves

The area ratio of a supersonic nozzle fixes its exit Mach number and says nothing whatever about its shape. What fixes the shape is a wave-by-wave construction in which the wall turns through exactly the angle needed to absorb each expansion as it arrives — and getting it wrong leaves a stream full of oblique shocks at precisely the right Mach number.

compressible · Characteristics $The wall lets go long before the textbook's shock arrives. Where the flow leaves the nozzle's wall, as a fraction of the divergent section's length, against the ratio of chamber to ambient pressure. The inviscid picture runs full to the exit until the pressure ratio falls to 24.5, where a normal shock stands at the exit, and then moves the shock inside. The wall flow separates instead, when its pressure falls to Summerfield's 0.4 of ambient — at a pressure ratio of 192 — or to Schmucker's Mach-dependent value, at 138: six to eight times higher. Across that whole band the textbook's nozzle is full and the real one is not.$

An overexpanded nozzle lets go before its shock arrives

The textbook's overexpanded nozzle runs full until its back pressure is high enough to hold a normal shock at the exit, and then draws the shock walking inside. A real nozzle never shows that sequence. Its wall's boundary layer cannot climb the pressure rise a normal shock imposes; it separates at a wall pressure of about four-tenths of ambient, which for a rocket nozzle happens at six to eight times the pressure ratio the textbook's shock needs. The separation is not a failure: it is what keeps the nozzle's thrust, and it is why a sea-level engine can be built twice the size it expands to.

compressible · Area mach

The exit area is a condition, not a second choice. Critical entrainment and critical compression ratio for a steam ejector with a mixing tube of 60 nozzle throats, against the nozzle's exit area as a multiple of the exit that delivers the jet at exactly the pressure it shares with the entrained gas. Both peak at the matched exit, at every suction drawn, so no exit area buys entrainment at the cost of compression or the other way. Halving the exit costs 2.4 per cent of the entrainment at a hundredth of the motive pressure, doubling it 3.2 per cent.

An ejector's nozzle exit is a condition, not a choice

A steam ejector has two areas a designer can pick, the mixing tube's and the nozzle exit's, and one of them looked like a second way round the trade between entrainment and compression. It is not. Both are largest with the exit matched to the pressure the jet meets, as a rocket's thrust is, and every other exit draws a curve inside the matched one. What moves the machine is loss, and the losses sort themselves: only the nozzle's reaches the entrainment, and the sharp edge of the characteristic belongs to the ideal machine alone.

applied · Ejector

Named alongside it

The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.

Model limit Thrust Adverse pressure gradient Area mach Area mach relation Boundary layer Choking Compressibility Discretisation Efficiency Ejector Entrainment

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