Sponsor
This work was performed under the auspices of the U. S. Department of Energy by the University of California Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract No. W-7405-Eng-48.
Published In
Physics of Plasmas
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
6-10-2004
Subjects
Plasma (Ionized gases), Plasma (Ionized gases) -- Measurement, Relativistic mechanics, Equations of state, Plasma (Ionized gases) -- Electrical properties
Abstract
Thermodynamic state relations for mixtures of partially ionized nonideal gases are often approximated by artificially partitioning the mixture into compartments or subvolumes occupied by the pure partially ionized constituent gases, and requiring these subvolumes to be in temperature and pressure equilibrium. This intuitively reasonable procedure is easily shown to reproduce the correct thermal and caloric state equations for a mixture of neutral nonionized ideal gases. The purpose of this paper is to point out that (a) this procedure leads to incorrect state equations for a mixture of partially ionized ideal gases, whereas (b) the alternative procedure of requiring that the subvolumes all have the same temperature and free electron density reproduces the correct thermal and caloric state equations for such a mixture. These results readily generalize to the case of partially degenerate and/or relativistic electrons, to a common approximation used to represent pressure ionization effects, and to two-temperature plasmas. This suggests that equating the subvolume electron number densities or chemical potentials instead of pressures is likely to provide a more accurate approximation in nonideal plasma mixtures.
DOI
10.1063/1.1758717
Persistent Identifier
http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/7683
Citation Details
J. D. Ramshaw, "Approximate thermodynamic state relations in partially ionized gas mixtures," Phys. Plasmas 11, 3572 (2004).
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.
© 2004 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/10.1063/1.1758717
* At the time of publication John D. Ramshaw was affiliated with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory