Summary
Experimental investigations on the reflection of plane shock waves over straight wedges indicated that there is a domain, the weak shock wave domain, inside which the resulted wave configurations resemble a Mach reflection although the classical three-shock theory does not provide a solution. This paradox is known as the von Neumann paradox.
While numerically investigating this paradox Colella & Henderson (1990) suggested that the observed reflections were not Mach reflections but von Neumann reflections, in which the reflected wave at the triple point was not a shock wave but a compression wave.
Vasilev & Kraiko (1999) concluded in the course of their numerical investigation, that the wave configuration includes in addition to the three shock waves a very tiny Prandtl-Meyer expansion fan centered at the triple point. This wave configuration, first predicted by Guderley (1947), was recently observed experimentally by Skews & Ashworth (2005) who named it Guderley reflection.
It has been found, in the course of the present study, that there are in fact three different reflection configurations inside the weak shock wave domain:
A von Neumann reflection - vNR,
A yet not named reflection - ?R,
A Guderley reflection - GR.
The transition boundaries between MR, vNR, ?R and GR and their domains have been determined analytically. The reported study presents a full solution of the weak shock wave domain, which has been puzzling the scientific community for a few decades.