Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 March 2009
Previously derived shock solutions for a perfectly conducting perfect gas are used to compute shock polars for the one-dimensional unsteady and two- dimensional non-aligned shock representations. A new special-case shock solution, having a downstream particle velocity relative to the shock equal to upstream Alfvén velocity, is obtained, in addition to exhaustive analytical classification schemes for the shock polars. Eight classes of one-dimensional polars and twelve classes of two-dimensional polars are identified.