Thermodynamic and transport properties of H35 and F5 plasma cutting mixtures in non-equilibrium

Abstract

Plasma science is a field in which modeling is used to play an important role for understanding and predicting the physical behavior of a plasma discharge. An application of plasma modeling is on plasma arc cutting devices which are characterized by a partially ionized plasma and by the use a of wide variety of gas mixtures, depending on the application. Knowledge of the thermodynamic and transport properties of these mixtures is a necessary prerequisite in order to perform correct simulations of these devices. Due to the lack of experimental data, the most reliable way to obtain these coefficients, for a wide variety of mixtures in the range of 300K to 40000K, is the Chapman-Enskog method for the solution of the Boltzmann equation. In this method the distribution function of the species is assumed to be a first order perturbed Maxwellian distribution. In these work some results are presented for H35 (argon 65% and hydrogen 35%) and F5 (nitrogen 95% and hydrogen 5%) mixtures using numerical codes developed by the authors for the calculation of nonequilibrium composition, thermodynamic and transport properties using the Bonnefoi electron and heavy particles decoupling approach. Results are compared with data available from previously published reports to check their accuracy.