CompFlow Tools

Normal Shock Calculator

Type into any box — including a pitot reading — and the rest of the shock follows. At any γ.

Every jump across a normal shock rises or falls monotonically with M₁, so any one of them fixes the whole shock. There is no second root to choose here.

Quantity Value every white box is an input

Isentropic state either side

UpstreamDownstream

Jumps against upstream Mach number

p₂/p₁ T₂/T₁ ρ₂/ρ₁ p₀₂/p₀₁ M₂

What this is computing

NOT WRITTEN YET — Iliya writes this, 300–500 words.

Deliberately loud so it cannot ship by accident. Worth covering:

  • Why a normal shock only ever runs one way — the entropy rise is what forbids the expansion shock, and it is the one place in this whole subject where the second law does visible work.
  • Why the density ratio saturates at (γ+1)/(γ−1) — 6 for air — no matter how fast the flow, while pressure and temperature keep climbing without limit.
  • Why M₂ has a floor rather than tending to zero, and what that floor means physically.
  • The pitot case: what a probe in supersonic flow actually reads, why you cannot use the incompressible formula, and why the shock in front of the probe is the reason.
  • Where the stagnation pressure goes. It is the loss that matters in inlet design, and it is why supersonic inlets use several oblique shocks instead of one normal one.