Toward analytical description of the electrostatic potential of charged macroparticle in weakly ionized plasma

Abstract

The results of the numerical studies of the electrostatic potential distribution around a solitary charged absorbing macroparticle embedded into weakly ionized strongly collisional plasma within the drift-diffusion approximation is presented. Nonisothermal and isothermal plasma as well as various grain sizes are considered. The comparison of calculated potential and plasma particles distributions with analytical expressions is performed. The possibility to describe the potential distribution with superposition of Debye and Coulomb potentials with effective charges is studied in details. The dependence of the scaling parameter for screening length and effective charges on macroparticle size and electron-to-ion temperature ratio is studied.