  In a previous paper we studied the thermodynamic and kinetic theory for an
ionized gas, in one space dimension; in this paper we provide an application of
those results to the reflection of a shock wave in an electromagnetic shock
tube. Under some reasonable limitations, which fully agree with experimental
data, we prove that both the incident and the reflected shock waves satisfy the
Lax entropy conditions; this result holds even outside genuinely nonlinear
regions, which are present in the model. We show that the temperature increases
in a significant way behind the incident shock front but the degree of
ionization does not undergo a similar growth. On the contrary, the degree of
ionization increases substantially behind the reflected shock front. We explain
these phenomena by means of the concavity of the Hugoniot loci. Therefore, our
results not only fit perfectly but explain what was remarked in experiments.
