Shock wave cannot travel any further upstream and the pressure progressively builds in that region; a high pressure shock wave rapidly forms. Shock waves are not conventional sound waves; a shock wave takes the form of a very sharp change in the gas properties. Shock waves in air are heard as a loud "crack" or "snap" noise. Over longer distances, a shock wave can change from a nonlinear wave into a linear wave, degenerating into a conventional sound wave as it heats the air and loses energy. The sound wave is heard as the familiar "thud" or "thump" of a sonic boom,
Shock wave Advanced techniques are needed to capture shock waves and to detect shock waves in both numerical computations and experimental observations. Computational fluid dynamics is commonly used to obtain the flow field with shock waves. Though shock waves are sharp discontinuities, in numerical solutions of fluid flow with discontinuities (shock wave, contact discontinuity or slip line), the shock wave can be smoothed out by low-order numerical method (due to numerical dissipation) or there are spurious oscillations near shock surface by high-order numerical method (due to Gibbs phenomena). There exist some other discontinuities in fluid flow than the shock wave. The slip