Collisional-Radiative Nonequilibrium and Precursor Effects in a Nitrogen Shock Wave

Improvements to a plasma code with a Collisional-Radiative (CR) non-equilibrium model are made, allowing for a more accurate description of the physical processes. The code allows for non-Boltzmann distributions of the electronic excited states by convecting separately each excited state, as a pseudo-specie. Each molecular state has also its own vibrational temperature, while a global rotational temperature is assumed. The free electron temperature is different from those of the excited states, and the electron heat conduction is also included. The CR model also uses a unique coupling between chemistry and vibrational energy (C-V coupling), which is fully coherent, and has the property of establishing thermal equilibrium as well as chemical equilibrium, on its own. We have also included a coupling between electronic excitations and vibrational energy (X-V coupling), which can have a strong influence on the vibrational temperature of some states. The recent improvements include the multi- temperature dependence of the chemical rates for associative ionization, as well as the estimation of the internal energies transferred during this process. Additionally, the distribution of energy into different translational modes (electron and heavy particles) is now correctly modeled. This provides a very rapid heating mechanism for the free electrons, since it is found that the electrons are generated with an average thermal energy of the same order as the heavy particle translational energy. This effect was observed by Gorelov et al in a recent paper, and lead to pronounced peaks in electron temperature immediately behind the shock. We will attempt ro reproduce this phenomenon. The last modification concerns the inclusion of the radiative terms into the calculations, thus enabling us to observe the effect of radiative losses and radiation transport. Preliminary tests have shown that the radiative losses are not negligible, i.e. the shock velocity drops when the radiative emission is included. In addition, we have observed some precursor excitation and ionization phenomena. These may be important at high shock velocities, and this will be investigated in detail. Precursor phenomena were also observed (in air) by Gorelov et al, and our results (for pure nitrogen) will be qualitatively compared with theirs.