New instabilites of unsteady transonic flows with non-equilibrium phase transition are presented including unsymmetric flow patterns with moving oblique shock systems in supersonic nozzles with perfectly symmetric shapes. The phenomena were first detected when performing experiments in our supersonic wind tunnel with atmospheric supply and could be perfectly reproduced by numerical simulations based on the Euler equations, i.e. neglecting the viscosity of the fluid. The formation of the liquid phase is modelled using the classical nucleation theory for the steady state together with the Hertz–Knudsen droplet growth law and yields qualitatively and quantitatively excellent agreement with experiments in the unsteady flow regime with high-frequency oscillations including the unstable transient change of the structure from symmetric to unsymmetric flow.

For engineering applications the sudden increase or decrease of the frequency by a factor 2 or more and of the pressure amplitude at the bifurcation limits is of immediate practical interest, e.g. for flutter excitation of turbomachinery blading.