Supersonic captive piston

Compression increases the speed of sound in all mediums.

are you writing a book and you're just procrastinating writing that hero novella where your protagonist can punch things with the aforementioned destructive force?

might be able to help

Not a writer, just curious about fast things making big booms.

An intense pressure wave compresses the air, heats it and, thereby, raises the local speed of sound.
So you have a succession of sound waves and the trailing ones travel a bit faster than the leading ones. They catch up and pile into a shock front -- a pressure discontinuity.

In REALLY intense explosions, like an A-bomb, the shock radiates heat into air the wave hadn't actually reached yet, so the entire wavefront travels faster than sound in undisturbed air; i.e. the state of the atmosphere before the bomb went off.

Shockwaves are quite real. is a Schlieren photo. The abrupt change in air density refracts passing light and creates shadow-images.

You're asking the wrong question. A shock wave is nothing but air being shoved out of the path of a moving body. Because the air is set into motion, it represents a _loss_, though some of the energy is recovered to do damage when the shock hit the target. And the energy is spread over a larger area.
But notice that the shock is a "V" which trails the tip of something going faster than sound.
Your fist hits first and the shock only catches up later.
What you want to compare is the KE in the fist and how much material that amount of energy could shatter. Unfortunately, that can be difficult to compute. Look up "Munroe effect" Destruction can vary widely depending on the precise manner energy is applied.

>You're asking the wrong question. A shock wave is nothing but air being shoved out of the path of a moving body. Because the air is set into motion, it represents a _loss_, though some of the energy is recovered to do damage when the shock hit the target. And the energy is spread over a larger area.

Yes, what I wan't to know is how much energy is transferred from the object into the air it collides with, and how does this change when velocity is increased or decreased.

>Your fist hits first and the shock only catches up later.

Right so what happens when the fist reaches the end of its travel length and the shockwave continues forwards.

>when velocity *and or mass is increased or decreased.

bump

the strength of a shock-wave in medium has nothing to do with mass of object and is dependent on the velocity of the object relative to medium.

All shock-waves propgate outwards - in case of object traveling continuously through medium, conically - meaning inverse square or inverse r applies minimum. in reality, all shock-wave non-isentropic across the shock boundary - dissipation of energy that can recovered as work is very fast.

TL:DR - unless you plan focussed shock-wave, such as the case with a "Monroe Effect," shock-wave are shitty way to do damage to anything.

I liked your shockwave explanation but I still have some confusion. Why do the trailing waves travelling faster cause the explosion? Also does this mean that a supersonic plane is constantly generating these shockwaves, not just once after breaking the sound barrier?

I'm curious about this too. Would it be possible to create focused "beams" of shockwaves using sometime similar to a parametric array somehow? I know very little about parametric arrays, so it may be a stupid question.

What about when the object is moving at wildly hypersonic velocities (triple digit mach and higher).