Quasiconical free interaction between a swept shock and a turbulent boundary layer

Previous observations that fin-generated interactions are quasi-conical in nature were further confirmed by surface pressure measurements spanning Mach 2.5-3.5, which encompassed unseparated through strongly separated interactions. For strongly separated interactions in which the shock wave is bifurcated into a lambda-foot structure, the conical free interaction hypothesis was validated through an appropriate scaling of the far-field surface pressure distribution. The behavior of the lambda-foot structure, such as the decrease of the slope of the separation shock with interaction strength, was explained by invoking the conical free interaction hypothesis. Through the conical free interaction hypothesis, it was further shown that the triple-shock intersection behaves in a complicated manner with changes in interaction strength.