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Plasma Chemistry and Plasma Processing, Vol.21, No.4, 483-503, 2001
Effects of vibrational nonequilibrium on the chemistry of two-temperature nitrogen plasmas
A new two-temperature chemical kinetics model for nitrogen plasmas is presented. The model is used together with the vibrationally-specific collisional-radiative model to study the effects of vibrational nonequilibrium distributions on the chemical composition of two-temperature atmospheric pressure nitrogen plasmas. It is found that over a wide range of conditions the vibrational levels follow Boltzmann distributions and that the vibrational temperature T-v is well approximated by gas temperature T-g at low electron number densities and by electron temperature T-e at high electron number densities. This result suggests that simple kinetic models with two-temperature rate coefficients can be used to reliably model non thermal plasmas. The calculation also yields a surprising result that, for a given constant gas temperature, the steady-state electron number density exhibits an S-shaped dependence on the electron temperature. This S-shaped behavior is caused by competing ionization, charge transfer reactions, two-body dissociative recombination, and three-body electron recombination reactions, and therefore is characteristic of molecular plasmas.
Keywords:two-temperature kinetic model;vibrational nonequilibrium;atmospheric pressure;nitrogen plasma;collisional-radiative model;recombination;ionization