Asymptotically self-similar flows are scarred for life: early injuries in problems of shock reflection and refraction
Self-similar inviscid flows in gas dynamics abound, e.g., strong Taylor-Sedov blast waves, shock diffraction and reflection at a compressive or expansion corner, and many other shock/shock interactions, shock slip lines interactions. With the neglect of viscous effects and the corresponding dissipation length and time scales, problems of shock dynamics are self-similar. Simple magnification of the length scales of observation can be obtained at correspondingly scaled evolution times. In reality, such problems are never self-similar at a young age. Characteristic length scales exist in these problems, often at the smallest scales (boundary layers, shear layers, shock structure, etc...). Our numerical experiments address how the introduction of small characteristic length scales affect the asymptotically self-similar solution at much later times. We pose the question: How does an early injury of the self-similar regime affect the solution at later t...
