The study of flow physics in microshock tubes is of growing importance with the recent development of microscale technology. The flow characteristics in a microshock tube is considerably different from that of the conventional macroshock tube due to the boundary layer effects and high Knudsen number effects. In the present study an axisymmetric computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method was employed to simulate the microshock tube flow field with Maxwell's slip velocity and temperature jump boundary conditions, to accommodate the rarefaction effects. The effects of finite diaphragm rupture process and partial diaphragm rupture on the flow field and the wave propagations were investigated, in detail. The results show that the shock propagation distance attenuates rapidly for a microshock tube compared to a macroshock tube. For microshock tubes, the contact surface comes closer to the shock front compared to the analytical macroshock tube case. Due to the finite diaphragm rupture process the moving shock front will be generated after a certain distance ahead of the diaphragm and get attenuated rapidly as it propagates compared to the sudden rupture case. The shock-contact distance reduces considerably for the finite diaphragm rupture case compared to the sudden diaphragm rupture process. A partially burst diaphragm within a microshock tube initiates a supersonic flow in the vicinity of the diaphragm similar to that of a supersonic nozzle flow. The supersonic flow expansion leads to the formation of oblique shock cells ahead of the diaphragm and significantly attenuates the moving shock propagation speed. Copyright © 2013 by ASME.