High-altitude gas releases - Transition from collisionless flow to diffusive flow in a nonuniform atmosphere

The paper is motivated by a need for describing high-altitude gas releases from rockets or the Space Shuttle. In the tenuous upper atmosphere, the injected gases expand from a collisionless to a collision-dominated state. The analysis presented extends the efforts of Baum (1973-1974) to include the effects of a nonuniform background atmosphere and a velocity-dependent collision frequency. The unsteady expansion of gas releases is analyzed using gas kinetic theory. The Boltzmann equation with the Krook collision integral is solved numerically. At late times (after many collisions with the background atmosphere) the solution is identical to the one given by diffusion in a nonuniform atmosphere (Bernhardt, 1979). The theoretical model predicts elongation and heating of the vapor trails due to collisions.