Computation analysis on properties of high temperature nitrogen arc plasmas

Macro features of plasma are closely related to its internal micro-processes. Calculating various plasma components as well as the thermodynamic and transport properties, which strongly depend on the former, not only lays the micro-theoretical foundation for a deeper understanding of the plasma formation mechanism, but also provides prerequisite data for the arc simulation adopting magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) model. Consequently, assuming local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE), we described the basic principles to calculate the properties of nitrogen arc plasmas. The recent method was adopted to obtain the partition functions and the updated data of collision integrals, and the new calculated results of thermodynamic properties and transport coefficients of nitrogen for 5 different pressures (0.01, 0.1, 0.3, 0.5 and 1 MPa) in the temperature range from 300 K to 40000 K were presented. Moreover, the results from recent literatures and those in this paper were analyzed and compared. The comparison indicates that the calculation in this paper yields very similar property values to the published data in other literatures, and the slight difference results from the adoption of different partition functions and collision integrals in this paper.