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 is a device designed to control the direction or characteristics of a fluid

flow(especially to increase velocity) as it exits (or enters) an enclosed chamber or
pipe via an orifice.

A nozzle is often a pipe or tube of varying cross sectional area, and it can be used
to direct or modify the flow of a fluid (liquid or gas). Nozzles are frequently used
to control the rate of flow, speed, direction, mass, shape, and/or the pressure of the
stream that emerges from them.

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, or    is a nozzle intended to eject gas or fluid in a
coherent stream into a surrounding medium. Gas jets are commonly found in gas
stoves, ovens, or barbecues. Gas jets were commonly used for light before the
development of electric light. Other types of fluid jets are found in carburetors,
where smooth calibrated orifice are used to regulate the flow of fuel into an
engine, and in jacuzzis or spas.

Another specialized jet is the laminar jet. This is a water jet that contains devices to
smooth out the pressure and flow, and gives laminar flow, as its name suggests.
This gives better results for fountains.


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Frequently the goal is to increase the kinetic energy of the flowing medium at the
expense of its pressure and internal energy.

Nozzles can be described as Ã

 (narrowing down from a wide diameter to

a smaller diameter in the direction of the flow) or 
 (expanding from a
smaller diameter to a larger one). A de Laval nozzle has a convergent section
followed by a divergent section and is often called a convergent-divergent nozzle
("con-di nozzle").

Convergent nozzles accelerate subsonic fluids. If the nozzle pressure ratio is high
enough the flow will reach sonic velocity at the narrowest point (i.e. the


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Increasing the nozzle pressure ratio further will not increase the throat Mach
number beyond unity. Downstream (i.e. external to the nozzle) the flow is free to
expand to supersonic velocities. Note that the Mach 1 can be a very high speed for
a hot gas; since the speed of sound varies as the square root of absolute
temperature. Thus the speed reached at a nozzle throat can be far higher than the
speed of sound at sea level. This fact is used extensively in rocketry where
hypersonic flows are required, and where propellant mixtures are deliberately
chosen to further increase the sonic speed.

Divergent nozzles slow fluids, if the flow is subsonic, but accelerate sonic or
supersonic fluids.

Convergent-divergent nozzles can therefore accelerate fluids that have choked in

the convergent section to supersonic speeds. This CD process is more efficient than
allowing a convergent nozzle to expand supersonically externally. The shape of the
divergent section also ensures that the direction of the escaping gases is directly
backwards, as any sideways component would not contribute to thrust.

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A jet exhaust produces a net thrust from the energy obtained from combusting fuel
which is added to the inducted air. This hot air is passed through a high speed
nozzle, a ’ ’




 which enormously increases its kinetic energy.

For a given mass flow, greater thrust is obtained with a higher exhaust velocity, but
the best energy efficiency is obtained when the exhaust speed is well matched with
the airspeed. However, no jet aircraft can maintain velocity while exceeding its
exhaust jet speed, due to momentum considerations. Supersonic jet engines, like
those employed in fighters and SST aircraft (e.g. Concorde), need high exhaust
speeds. Therefore supersonic aircraft very typically use a CD nozzle despite weight
and cost penalties. Subsonic jet engines employ relatively low, subsonic, exhaust
velocities. They thus employ simple convergent nozzles. In addition, bypass
nozzles are employed giving even lower speeds.
Vocket motors use convergent-divergent nozzles with very large area ratios so as
to maximise thrust and exhaust velocity and thus extremely high nozzle pressure
ratios are employed. Mass flow is at a premium since all the propulsive mass is
carried with vehicle, and very high exhaust speeds are desirable.

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Magnetic nozzles have also been proposed for some types of propulsion, such as
VASIMV, in which the flow of plasma is directed by magnetic fields instead of
walls made of solid matter.

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Many nozzles produce a very fine spray of liquids.

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 are used for spray painting, perfumes, carburettors for
internal combustion engines, spray on deodorants, antiperspirants and many
other uses.
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-uses an opening in the cone shaped nozzle to inject
air into a stream of water based foam (CAFS/AFFF/FFFP) to make the
concentrate "foam up". Most commonly found on foam extinguishers and
foam handlines.
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 inject the liquid in tangentially, and it spirals into the center
and then exits through the central hole. Due to the vortexing this causes the
spray to come out in a cone shape.

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Vacuum cleaner nozzles come in several different shapes.

 
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Some nozzles are shaped to produce a stream that is of a particular shape. For
example extrusion molding is a way of producing lengths of metals or plastics or
other materials with a particular cross-section. This nozzle is typically referred to
as a die.

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The purpose of this applet is to simulate the operation of a converging-diverging
nozzle, perhaps the most important and basic piece of engineering hardware
associated with propulsion and the high speed flow of gases. This device was
invented by Carl de Laval toward the end of the l9th century and is thus often
referred to as the 'de Laval' nozzle. This applet is intended to help students of
compressible aerodynamics visualize the flow through this type of nozzle at a
range of conditions.YY

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The usual configuration for a converging diverging (CD) nozzle is shown in the
figure. Gas flows through the nozzle from a region of high pressure (usually
referred to as the chamber) to one of low pressure (referred to as the ambient or
tank). The chamber is usually big enough so that any flow velocities here are
negligible. The pressure here is denoted by the symbol ’Ã. Gas flows from the
chamber into the converging portion of the nozzle, past the throat, through the
diverging portion and then exhausts into the ambient as a jet. The pressure of the
ambient is referred to as the 'back pressure' and given the symbol ’ .

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A simple example
To get a basic feel for the behavior of the nozzle imagine performing the simple
experiment shown in figure 2. Here we use a converging diverging nozzle to
connect two air cylinders. Cylinder A contains air at high pressure, and takes the
place of the chamber. The CD nozzle
exhausts this air into cylinder B,
which takes the place of the tank.

Imagine you are controlling the

pressure in cylinder B, and measuring
the resulting mass flow rate through
the nozzle. You may expect that the
lower you make the pressure in B the
more mass flow you'll get through the
nozzle. This is true, but only up to a
point. If you lower the back pressure
enough you come to a place where
the flow rate suddenly stops
increasing all together and it doesn't
matter how much lower you make the
back pressure (even if you make it a
vacuum) you can't get any more mass

flow out of the nozzle. We say that the nozzle has become 'choked'. You could
delay this behavior by making the nozzle throat bigger (e.g. grey line) but
eventually the same thing would happen. The nozzle will become choked even if
you eliminated the throat altogether and just had a converging nozzle.

The reason for this behavior has to do with the way the flows behave at Mach 1,
i.e. when the flow speed reaches the speed of sound. In a steady internal flow (like
a nozzle) the Mach number can only reach 1 at a minimum in the cross-sectional
area. When the nozzle isn't choked, the flow through it is entirely subsonic and, if
you lower the back pressure a little, the flow goes faster and the flow rate
increases. As you lower the back pressure further the flow speed at the throat
eventually reaches the speed of sound (Mach 1).

Any further lowering of the back pressure can't accelerate the flow through the
nozzle any more, because that would entail moving the point where M=1 away
from the throat where the area is a minimum, and so the flow gets stuck. The flow
pattern downstream of the nozzle (in the diverging section and jet) can still change
if you lower the back pressure further, but the mass flow rate is now fixed because
the flow in the throat (and for that matter in the entire converging section) is now
fixed too.

The changes in the flow pattern after the nozzle has become choked are not very
important in our thought experiment because they don't change the mass flow rate.
They are, however, very important however if you were using this nozzle to
accelerate the flow out of a jet engine or rocket and create propulsion, or if you just
want to understand how high-speed flows work.
The flow pattern
Figure 3a shows the flow through
the nozzle when it is completely
subsonic (i.e. the nozzle isn't
choked). The flow accelerates out of
the chamber through the converging
section, reaching its maximum
(subsonic) speed at the throat. The
flow then decelerates through the
diverging section and exhausts into
the ambient as a subsonic jet.
Lowering the back pressure in this
state increases the flow speed
everywhere in the nozzle.

Lower it far enough and we

eventually get to the situation shown
in figure 3b. The flow pattern is
exactly the same as in subsonic flow,
except that the flow speed at the
throat has just reached Mach 1. Flow
through the nozzle is now choked
since further reductions in the back
pressure can't move the point of
M=1 away from the throat.
However, the flow pattern in the
diverging section does change as
you lower the back pressure further.

As ’ is lowered below that needed

to just choke the flow a region of
supersonic flow forms just
downstream of the throat. Unlike a
subsonic flow, the supersonic flow
accelerates as the area gets bigger.
This region of supersonic
acceleration is terminated by a
normal shock wave. The shock wave
produces a near-instantaneous
deceleration of the flow to subsonic
speed. This subsonic flow then decelerates through the remainder of the diverging
section and exhausts as a subsonic jet. In this regime if you lower or raise the back
pressure you increase or decrease the length of supersonic flow in the diverging
section before the shock wave.

If you lower ’ enough you can extend the supersonic region all the way down the
nozzle until the shock is sitting at the nozzle exit (figure 3d). Because you have a
very long region of acceleration (the entire nozzle length) in this case the flow
speed just before the shock will be very large in this case. However, after the shock
the flow in the jet will still be subsonic.

Lowering the back pressure further causes the shock to bend out into the jet (figure
3e), and a complex pattern of shocks and reflections is set up in the jet which will
now involve a mixture of subsonic and supersonic flow, or (if the back pressure is
low enough) just supersonic flow. Because the shock is no longer perpendicular to
the flow near the nozzle walls, it deflects it inward as it leaves the exit producing
an initially contracting jet. We refer to this as overexpanded flow because in this
case the pressure at the nozzle exit is lower than that in the ambient (the back
pressure)- i.e. the flow has been expanded by the nozzle to much.

A further lowering of the back pressure changes and weakens the wave pattern in
the jet. Eventually we will have lowered the back pressure enough so that it is now
equal to the pressure at the nozzle exit. In this case, the waves in the jet disappear
altogether (figure 3f), and the
jet will be uniformly
supersonic. This situation, since
it is often desirable, is referred
to as the 'design condition'.

Finally, if we lower the back

pressure even further we will
create a new imbalance
between the exit and back
pressures (exit pressure greater
than back pressure), figure 3g.
In this situation (called
'underexpanded') what we call
expansion waves (that produce
gradual turning and acceleration in the jet) form at

the nozzle exit, initially turning the flow at the jet edges outward in a plume and
setting up a different type of complex wave pattern.

The pressure distribution in the nozzle

A plot of the pressure distribution along the nozzle (figure 4) provides a good way
of summarizing its behavior. To understand how the pressure behaves you have to
remember only a few basic rules

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is a tube that is pinched in the middle, making a carefully
balanced, asymmetric hourglass-shape. It is used to accelerate a hot, pressurised
gas passing through it to a supersonic speed, and upon expansion, to shape the
exhaust flow so that the heat energy propelling the flow is maximally converted
into directed kinetic energy. Because of this, the nozzle is widely used in some
types of steam turbine, it is an essential part of the modern rocket engine, and it

also sees use in supersonic jet engines.

Similar flow properties have been applied to jet streams within astrophysics

Operation

Its operation relies on the different properties of gases flowing at subsonic and
supersonic speeds. The speed of a subsonic flow of gas will increase if the pipe
carrying it narrows because the mass flow rate is constant. The gas flow through a
de Laval nozzle is isentropic (gas entropy is nearly constant). At subsonic flow the
gas is compressible; sound, a small pressure wave, will propagate through it. At the
"throat", where the cross sectional area is a minimum, the gas velocity locally
becomes sonic (Mach number = 1.0), a condition called choked flow. As the
nozzle cross sectional area increases the gas begins to expand and the gas flow
increases to supersonic velocities where a sound wave will not propagate
backwards through the gas as viewed in the frame of reference of the nozzle (Mach
number > 1.0).

Conditions for operation

A de Laval nozzle will only choke at the throat if the pressure and mass flow
through the nozzle is sufficient to reach sonic speeds, otherwise no supersonic flow
is achieved and it will act as a Venturi tube; this requires the entry pressure to the
nozzle to be significantly above ambient at all times (equivalently, the stagnation
pressure of the jet must be above ambient).
In addition, the pressure of the gas at the exit of the expansion portion of the
exhaust of a nozzle must not be too low. Because pressure cannot travel upstream
through the supersonic flow, the exit pressure can be significantly below ambient
pressure it exhausts into, but if it is too far below ambient, then the flow will cease
to be supersonic, or the flow will separate within the expansion portion of the
nozzle, forming an unstable jet that may 'flop' around within the nozzle, possibly
damaging it.

In practice ambient pressure must be no higher than roughly 2-3 times the pressure
in the supersonic gas at the exit for supersonic flow to leave the nozzle.

?nalysis of gas flow in de Laval nozzles

The analysis of gas flow through de Laval nozzles involves a number of concepts
and assumptions:

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As the gas enters a nozzle, it is traveling at subsonic velocities. As the throat

contracts down the gas is forced to accelerate until at the nozzle throat, where the
cross-sectional area is the smallest, the linear velocity becomes sonic. From the
throat the cross-sectional area then increases, the gas expands and the linear
velocity becomes progressively more supersonic.

The linear velocity of the exiting exhaust gases can be calculated using the
following equation:[1] [2] [3]

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various propellants are:

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