While the World War I triggered the scientific study on the field of Shock Waves which was mostly confined to gas dynamics, high-speed aerodynamics and defense technology, it emerged truly into a large interdisciplinary field by its own after the onset of World War II. For obvious reasons all these studies were essentially funded by the governmental and semi-governmental sources. With the progress in the understanding of fundamental theory, methods of producing shock waves in the laboratory, equation-of-state data, high-speed measurement techniques, visualization methods and computational fluid dynamic techniques, many basic science and engineering branches have emerged. However, for such an evolved field its adaptation for the daily life applications is very minimal. In this sense the field of shock waves is a solution looking for many problems.
In this presentation we provide glimpses of the commercial potential of shock waves by describing some of the successfully launched many products recently from our laboratory. These products include hand operated table top shock tube, named Reddy tube [1,2] and hand operated table top hypersonic shock tunnel shown in Fig. 1. These two products are essentially developed as teaching tools for graduate and undergraduate level courses. In addition the table top shock tube and its variants are finding applications in many fields including study of traumatic brain injury as shown in Fig. 2a and improvement of artificial insemination gun performance, named SuperBull [3], shown in Fig. 2 b.
(a)(b)
Fig. 1. Hand operated table top shock tube (a) and hypersonic shock tunnel (b) for educational purpose.
(a)(b)
Fif. 2. Application of Reddy tube for investigation of Traumatic Brain Injury in rats (a) and modified Artificial Insemination gun, SuperBull (b).
We have also developed shock wave based systems for tea manufacturing and wood processing industry. In this lecture we will present a brief account of our efforts to take the shock waves to market place and present some of our established products. We hope that this talk will enthuse other shock wave researchers to follow the suit.
References:
1. N. Sharath and K. P. J. Reddy,"Manually operated piston-driven shock tube” Current Science 104, pp. 172-176, 2013.
2. K. S. Surana, K. P. J. Reddy, A. D. Joy and J. N. Reddy, “Riemann Shock Tube: Evolution, Propagation, Reflection, and Interactions of 1D Normal Shocks in Air; Numerical Simulations and Experiments”, Int. J. CFD, pp. 1-21, 2014.
3. Richard Stone, “News Focus: Science in India - India Rising”, Science 335, pp. 904-910, 2012.
