logo SBA

ETD

Archivio digitale delle tesi discusse presso l’Università di Pisa

Tesi etd-06292017-005812


Tipo di tesi
Tesi di laurea magistrale
Autore
AMATO, CHIARA
URN
etd-06292017-005812
Titolo
Non-boltzmann modeling of electron kinetics for application to hypersonic plasma flows
Dipartimento
INGEGNERIA CIVILE E INDUSTRIALE
Corso di studi
INGEGNERIA AEROSPAZIALE
Relatori
relatore Prof. D'Agostino, Luca
correlatore Prof. Panesi, Marco
Parole chiave
  • Boltzmann equation
  • collisional-radiative model
  • hypersonic plasma flow
  • non-Boltzmann distribution
Data inizio appello
18/07/2017
Consultabilità
Completa
Riassunto
The study of high speed, unsteady non-equilibrium flows are one of the main challenges in the hypersonic research. They are found in different space applications: for instance the wake region of a capsule during the reentry phase and the converging-diverging nozzle. In particular, the non-equilibrium effects control the back shell heating in high-speed entries. They play an important role in thermal protection system design. Moreover, the non-equilibrium vibrational and electronic kinetics affects the high-enthalpy nozzle flow with significant changes in chemical kinetics and rate coefficients. The knowledge of the nature and extent of the non-equilibrium phenomena in an expansion allows predicting those effects.
The primary objective of this work is to devise a framework for studying the non-equilibrium modeling of the electron kinetics in rarefied molecular gases, under the action of an expanding flow. In these conditions, the electron energy distribution function is non-equilibrium. First of all, a collisional-radiative model is analyzed to evaluate the concentration of the gas species, the distribution of the species populations and the flow proprieties for an ionizing regime treating each internal energy level as an independent pseudo-species with its kinetics. Second, a Boltzmann equation solver was implemented to evaluate the electron nonequilibrium distribution function. The rate and transport coefficients are used to couple the Boltzmann solver with the zero-dimensional flow solver to remove the temperature dependence of the species distribution.
File