Thermodynamic properties and transport coefficients of two-temperature helium thermal plasmas

Abstract

Helium thermal plasmas are in widespread use in arc welding and many other industrial applications. Simulation of these processes relies on accurate plasma property data, such as plasma composition, thermodynamic properties and transport coefficients. Departures from LTE (local thermodynamic equilibrium) generally occur in some regions of helium plasmas. In this paper, properties are calculated allowing for different values of the electron temperature, Te, and heavy-species temperature, Th, at atmospheric pressure from 300 K to 30 000 K. The plasma composition is first calculated using the mass action law, and the two-temperature thermodynamic properties are then derived. The viscosity, diffusion coefficients, electrical conductivity and thermal conductivity of the two-temperature helium thermal plasma are obtained using a recently-developed method that retains coupling between electrons and heavy species by including the electron–heavy-species collision term in the heavy-species Boltzmann equation. It is shown that the viscosity and the diffusion coefficients strongly depend on non-equilibrium ratio θ (), through the plasma composition and the collision integrals. The electrical conductivity, which depends on the electron number density and ordinary diffusion coefficients, and the thermal conductivity have similar dependencies. The choice of definition of the Debye length is shown to affect the electrical conductivity significantly for θ > 1. By comparing with literature data, it is shown that the coupling between electrons and heavy species has a significant influence on the electrical conductivity, but not on the viscosity. Plasma properties are tabulated in the supplementary data.