Description and Use of a Computer Program for Unsteady One-Dimensional Calculations of Shock Tunnel Processes

The construction of a free piston shock tunnel (T5) at the Graduate Aeronautical Laboratories of the California Institute of Technology was the main driving force to develop an integrated computer program able to simulate the gas dynamical processes in such a facility. All the necessary tools to simulate the new shock tunnel are well known, the major problem was to incorporate all these into one program. At the same time, a need was also felt to predict the performance of a new combustion shock tube, which has been developed by the author, in order to provide a supply of hot hydrogen for injection into the T5 main flow. The result is a FORTRAN program called TUNNEL, it can simulate the flow of these types of shock tunnel but it can also simulate more standard ones.