One-Temperature Approximation of CO2 Dissociation Kinetics in Non-Thermal Plasma

One-Temperature Approximation of CO2 Dissociation Kinetics in Non-Thermal Plasma 

This kinetic approximation assumes a single vibrational temperature 77 for CO2 molecules and, therefore, is sometimes referred to as quasi equilibrium of vibrational modes. As one can see from (5-20), most of the vibrationally excited molecules can be considered as being in quasi continuum in this case. Vibrational kinetics of polyatomic molecules in quasi continuum was discussed in Chapter 3. The CO2 dissociation rate is limited not by elementary dissociation itself, but via energy transfer from a low to high vibrational excitation level of the molecule in the W-relaxation processes. Such a kinetic situation was referred to in Chapter 3 as the fast reaction limit. The population of highly excited states with vibrational energy E depends in this case on the number of vibrational degrees of freedom 5 and is proportional to the density of the vibrational states p E) a. The 

CO2 dissociation rate coefficient can be expressed in the quasi equilibrium of vibrational modes as (Potapkin et al., 1980) 

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