PLASMAKIN: A chemical kinetics library for plasma physics modeling

Abstract

PLASMAKIN is a software library to handle physical and chemical data used in plasma physics modeling and to compute kinetics data from the reactions taking place in the gas or at the surfaces — particle generation and loss rates, photon emission rates and energy exchange rates. PLASMAKIN supports any number of chemical species and reactions, is independent of problem dimensions and can be used both in stationary and time-dependent problems. PLASMAKIN supports a large number of species properties and reaction types. Namely gas or electron temperature dependent collision rate coefficients, vibrational and cascade levels, evaluation of branching ratios, superelastic and other reverse processes, three-body collisions, radiation imprisonment and photoelectric emission. Non-standard rate coefficient functions can be handled by a user supplied routine. The interaction of the user with the library is limited to the preparation of an input file characterizing the interacting species and reactions, accessing the data or the chemical kinetics results through a reduced number of procedure calls with similar interfaces. PLASMAKIN allows the user to concentrate on the physical nature of the problems independently of the gas mixture properties and reactions model. As an example a program has been prepared to evaluate the maintenance field, equilibrium populations, relative contribution of each reaction, photon emission spectra and the energy losses rates on the positive column region of a discharge in electropositive gases. The program is applied to a discharge in neon. The library is written in Fortran 95 and has error support.