Analysis of vibrational relaxation regions by means of the Rayleigh-line method

The physics of shock-waves with vibrational relaxation regions is recapitulated, and it is shown that exact methods of analysis can be developed from the classical Rayleigh-line equations by treating the real gas as an ideal gas with heat transfer. By using these methods to analyse experimental records of density distributions in relaxation regions, a large number of local values of the relaxation frequency, rather than a single over-all value, may be obtained from each shock-wave record.