Weak discontinuities in a non-equilibrium flow of a dusty gas

Summary The behavior of a discontinuity in flow gradients at the head of a disturbance propagating through a homogeneous mixture of gas and small dust particles has been studied. It is shown that the presence of dust particles results in increasing the shock formation time as compared with a similar pure-gas case. When the disturbance is arbitrarily small in amplitude, the solution to the first order in the whole disturbed domain is constructed and analysed. It is found that the concentration of solid particles has a decaying, effect on the shock strength as one, might expect.