Laboratory experiments of supersonic flows through clumpy environments

Supersonic flows through heterogeneous environments are common in astrophysics as evidenced by high resolution Hubble Space Telescope images of a variety of astrophysical objects, including supernova remnants and stellar jets. In many instances, the imaged flows exhibit a complex morphology consisting of multiple clumps, bow shocks, and filamentary structure extending over a range of spatial scales. To gain a better understanding of the dynamics occurring in such multi-clump flows, scaled laboratory experiments are being carried out at the Omega Laser Facility. In these experiments, a laser pulse is used to heat a halfraum to indirectly drive a near planar shock through a target that typically consists of many small dense spheres embedded in lower density foam. The evolution of the target is then imaged using x-ray radiography. Targets have been designed to span the parameter space of clump number and clump size distribution, as well as investigate the quantitative differences in shock propagation through a clumpy target with that of a uniform target of the same average density. An overview of the experiments and comparison with simulations will be presented.