Abstract
Except some empirical methods, which have been developed in the past, no analytical method exists to describe the evolutionary behavior of a shock wave without limiting its strength. In this paper, we have derived a system of transport equations for the shock strength and the induced continuity. We generate a completely intrinsic description of plane, cylindrical, and spherical shock waves of weak strength, propagating into a non-ideal gas. It is shown that for a weak shock, the disturbance evolves like an acceleration wave at the leading order. For a weak shock, we may assume that [p] = O(epsilon) 0 <epsilon << 1:. We have considered a case when the effect of the first orderinduced discontinuity or the disturbances that overtook the shock from behind are strong, i.e., [p(x)] = O(1). The evolutionary behavior of the weak shocks in a non-ideal gas is described using the truncation approximation.