Physics Commons^™

Approximate Thermodynamic State Relations In Partially Ionized Gas Mixtures, John D. Ramshaw

Physics Faculty Publications and Presentations

Thermodynamic state relations for mixtures of partially ionized nonideal gases are often approximated by artificially partitioning the mixture into compartments or subvolumes occupied by the pure partially ionized constituent gases, and requiring these subvolumes to be in temperature and pressure equilibrium. This intuitively reasonable procedure is easily shown to reproduce the correct thermal and caloric state equations for a mixture of neutral nonionized ideal gases. The purpose of this paper is to point out that (a) this procedure leads to incorrect state equations for a mixture of partially ionized ideal gases, whereas (b) the alternative procedure of requiring that the …