The spherical shock wave in a rarefied polyatomic gas is analyzed based on Rational Extended Thermodynamics (RET) with six independent fields; the mass density, velocity, pressure and dynamic pressure. By adopting the method on the basis of Lie group theory proposed in [A. Donato and T. Ruggeri, Similarity Solutions and Strong Shocks in Extended Thermodynamics of Rarefied Gas, Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications, 251, (2000) 395-405], we derive a new system of ordinary differential equations, which depends on a single similarity variable. The boundary conditions are obtained from the Rankine-Hugoniot conditions for a strong shock. It is shown that the similarity solution is characterized by only one parameter and the preliminary numerical results address the important role of the dynamic pressure on the profile, which is different from the one of the well-known Sedov-von Neumann-Taylor solution.
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