Modeling shock waves in an ideal gas: Going beyond the Navier-Stokes level

We model a shock wave in an ideal gas by solving a modified version of the compressible Navier-Stokes equations of hydrodynamics, where, following an earlier conjecture by Holian [Phys. Rev. A 37, 2562 (1988)], we use the temperature in the direction of shock propagation Txx, rather than the average temperature T=(Txx+Tyy+Tzz)/3, in the evaluation of the linear transport coefficients. The results are found to agree much better with the molecular-dynamics simulations of Salomons and Mareschal [Phys. Rev. Lett. 69, 269 (1992)] than standard Navier-Stokes theory