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Mach 2 Shock Waves, in Real Time, in the Browser
We ran a sphere, a rectangle and a triangle through the same Mach 2 supersonic stream in OTOM CFD, and each writes its own shock signature. The blunt sphere and rectangle throw off strong detached bow shocks, while the triangle slices the flow into a clean attached oblique shock.
What makes this regime genuinely hard is that supersonic flow obeys nonlinear hyperbolic equations where information cannot travel upstream, so shocks appear as true discontinuities that most solvers smear or choke on. OTOM resolves all three, with their bow shocks and expansion fans, in real time on the GPU, right in the browser.
It turns out you don’t need a supercomputer to break the sound barrier, just a solid Riemann solver and a sense of humour about aerodynamics.
Try it: otomcomposite.eu/CFD
Originally shared on LinkedIn.