Stability of oblique sonic shocks in steady supersonic potential flow past a wedge

Abstract

When a uniform steady supersonic oncoming flow impinges on a straight wedge, if the wedge angle is smaller than the detachment angle, two types of steady oblique shocks satisfying the entropy condition will form in the flow field: weak shocks with supersonic or subsonic downstream flow, and strong shocks with subsonic downstream flow. There have been many results on the stability of oblique shocks with subsonic or supersonic downstream flow. However, much less is known about the stability of oblique shocks with sonic downstream flow, since the flow behind the shock wave is very sensitive to disturbances. This paper investigates the stability of oblique sonic shocks under the assumption of a straight wedge with non-uniform incoming flow. We reduce the problem to a degenerate hyperbolic free boundary problem. A local Lipschitz-continuous solution with sonic-supersonic downstream flow to the free boundary problem is constructed, using the classical Ascoli-Arzelà theorem and a diagonal argument. The main difficulty of this free boundary problem lies in the hyperbolic degeneracy on the sonic line. By adopting a weighted characteristic decomposition method, we establish a delicate estimate of the downstream flow near the sonic line.