Attenuation law of planar shock waves propagating through dust-gas suspensions

In this expression a and ft are constants for a given initial shock wave Mach number. Olim et al. also calculated the appropriate values of these two constants for MO = 1.5. The appropriate values as obtained by them were a = 2.275 m and ft = 3.07 x 10. The correlation proposed by Olim et al. implies that when x -> oo the instantaneous shock wave Mach number degenerates to a sound wave, i.e., M ->• 1. This has been found experimentally' to be the case only if the initial shock wave is weak to moderate and the dust loading ratio is relatively high. If, however, the initial shock waves are strong and the dust loading ratios are low to moderate, the shock waves do not attenuate to sound waves but to finite strength shock waves whose Mach numbers Me are larger than unity.' Owing to this observation, it was suggested by Olim et al. to replace Eq. (1) by the following more general expression: