Abstract: In order to reduce the early contamination of the test gas in a shock tube, caused by reflected and transmitted shock bifurcation, a novel shock tube of utilizing suction through slots in its walls has been investigated in this paper. In the case of suction, the function of the slots is discussed, the calculating methods of the performance parameters are given and the shape of the shock bifurcation due to interaction between the shock wave and boundary layer is described. It has been confirmed by experiment...