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This work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC52-07NA27344
Published In
Physics of Plasmas
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2-2014
Subjects
Equations of state, Plasma (Ionized gases) -- Mathematical models, Thermodynamics
Abstract
Approximate thermodynamic state relations for multicomponent atomic and molecular gas mixtures are often constructed by artificially partitioning the mixture into its constituent materials and requiring the separated materials to be in temperature and pressure equilibrium. Iterative numerical algorithms have been employed to enforce this equilibration and compute the resulting approximate state relations in single-temperature mixtures. In partially ionized gas mixtures, there is both theoretical and empirical evidence that equilibrating the chemical potentials, number densities, or partial pressures of the free electrons is likely to produce more accurate results than equilibrating the total pressures. Moreover, in many situations of practical interest the free electrons and heavy particles have different temperatures. In this paper, we present a generalized algorithm for equilibrating the heavy-particle and electron temperaturesand a third user-specified independent thermodynamic variable in a two-temperature plasmamixture. Test calculations based on the equilibration of total pressure vs. electron pressure are presented for three different mixtures.
DOI
10.1063/1.4866149
Persistent Identifier
http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/16455
Citation Details
Ramshaw, J. and Cook, A. (2014). Physics of Plasmas 21, 022706.
Description
This work was authored as part of the Contributor's official duties as an Employee of the United States Government and is therefore a work of the United States Government. In accordance with 17 U.S.C. 105, no copyright protection is available for such works under U.S. Law.
© 2014 AIP Publishing LLC. This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and AIP Publishing. The following article appeared in Physics of Plasmas and may be found at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4866149