Uncertainty analysis for the steady-state flows in a dual throat nozzle

It is well known that the steady state of an isentropic flow in a dual-throat nozzle with equal throat areas is not unique. In particular there is a possibility that the flow contains a shock wave, whose location is determined solely by the initial condition. In this paper, we consider cases with uncertainty in this initial condition and use generalized polynomial chaos methods to study the steady-state solutions for stochastic initial conditions. Special interest is given to the statistics of the shock location. The polynomial chaos (PC) expansion modes are shown to be smooth functions of the spatial variable x, although each solution realization is discontinuous in the spatial variable x. When the variance of the initial condition is small, the probability density function of the shock location is computed with high accuracy. Otherwise, many terms are needed in the PC expansion to produce reasonable results due to the slow convergence of the PC expansion, caused by non-smoothness in random space. (c) 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.