Calculation of the net emission coefficient of an air thermal plasma at very high pressure

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to present an accurate evaluation of the phenomena appearing for high pressure air plasmas supposed to be in local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE). In the past, we already calculated the net emission coefficient for air mixtures at atmospheric pressure and for temperatures up to 30kK (molecular contribution being restricted to 10kK). Unfortunately, the existence of high pressures does not allow us to use this database due to the non-ideality of the plasma (Viriel and Debye corrections, energy cut-off ), and due to the significant shifts of molecular reactions towards upper temperatures. Consequently, this paper proposes an improvement of our previous works with a consideration of high pressure corrections in the composition algorithm in order to take into account the pressure effects, and with a new calculation of all the contributions of the plasma radiation (atomic lines and continuum, molecular continuum, and molecular bands) using an updated database. A particular attention is paid to calculate the contribution of all the major molecular band systems to the radiation: O2 (Schumann-Runge), N2 (VUV, 1st and 2nd positive), NO (IR, β, γ, δ, ε) and N 2+ (1st negative and Meinel). The discrete atomic lines and molecular bands radiation including the overlapping are calculated by a line-by-line method up to 30kK and 100 bar. This updated database is validated in the case of optically thin plasmas and pressure of 1bar by the comparison of our integrated emission strength with the published results. Finally, this work shows the necessity to extend the molecular radiation database up to 15kK at high pressure (bands and continuum) since their corresponding contributions could not be neglected at high temperature.