Hydrodynamic flow of ions and atoms in partially ionized plasmas.
We have derived the hydrodynamic equations of motion for a partially ionized plasma, when the ionized component and the neutral components have different flow velocities and kinetic temperatures. Starting from the kinetic equations for a gas of ions and a gas of atoms we have considered various processes of encounters between the two species: self-collisions, interspecies collisions, ionization, recombination, and charge exchange. Our results were obtained by developing a general approach for the hydrodynamics of a gas in a binary mixture, in particular when the components drift with respect to each other. This was applied to a partially ionized plasma, when the neutral-species gas and the charged-species gas have separate velocities. We have further suggested a generalized version of the relaxation time approximation and obtained the contributions of the interspecies encounters to the transport equations.
Nemirovsky
R A
RA
Department of Physics, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa 32000, Israel. roni@physics.technion.ac.il
Fredkin
D R
DR
Ron
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A