SELF-SIMILAR POWER-DRIVEN EXPANSION INTO VACUUM

Planar, power-driven expansion into a vacuum is found to be self-similar for a power-law driving source for the two ideal cases of a thick slab and a thin foil. For the thick slab expansion, an asymptotic solution for the far-blowoff region is obtained and a numerical solution is present for the rest of the expansion wave. For the thin foil expansion, an analytical solution is obtained. In both cases, the solutions exhibit an unbounded flow field with velocities tending to infinity as a consequence of the continuum assumption, a finite temperature limit for the far-blowoff material, and density profiles that decrease as a Gaussian in the far expanded material. © 1979 American Institute of Physics.