Abstract : A study of the motions of solid particles in a dusty gas in the inviscid hypersonic shock layers of slender wedges and cones and the stagnation regions of cylinders and spheres is carried out. Particles of uniform size and with a size distribution are considered. Analytic drag laws for the particles are used for the cases of low, intermediate, and high particle Reynolds numbers. For a uniform particle size cloud the collection efficiency is shown to be expressible in terms of a single parameter embodying the particle characteristics, shock strength, and wedge or cone angle. In the case of the stagnation region solutions there is a corresponding similarity law but it is shown not to depend on the explicit form of the drag law or whether the flow is plane or axisymmetric. It is shown that when the appropriate similarity parameter is around one the collection efficiency rises rapidly from zero to one, with the rise almost discontinuous in the stagnation region cases. With a particle size distribution there is found to be very little deviation from the uniform size results at high Reynolds number and only small departures for other Reynolds number ranges. (Author)