The thermodynamic and transport prorerties of high-temperature air are found in closed form starting from approximate partition functions for the major components in air and neglecting all minor components. The compressibility, energy, entropy, the specific heats, the speed of sound, the coefficients of viscosity and of thermal conductivity, and the Prandtl numbers for air are tabulated from 500 degrees to 15,000 degrees K over a range of pressure from 0.0001 to 100 atmospheres. The enthalpy of air and the mol fractions of the major components of air can easily be found from the tabulated values for compressibility and energy. It is predicted that the Prandtl number for fully ionized air will become small compared to unity, the order of 0.01, and this implies that boundary layers in such flow will be very transparent to heat flux.

Thermodynamic and transport properties of air, and combustion products of natural gas and air, and jet engine fuel and air.

Molecular Physics and Hypersonic Flows bridges the gap between the fluid dynamics and molecular physics communities, emphasizing the role played by elementary processes in hypersonic flows. In particular, the work is primarily dedicated to filling the gap between microscopic and macroscopic treatments of the source terms to be inserted in the fluid dynamics codes. The first part of the book describes the molecular dynamics of elementary processes both in the gas phase and in the interaction with surfaces by using quantum mechanical and phenomenological approaches. A second group of contributions describes thermodynamics and transport properties of air components, with special attention to the transport of internal energy. A series of papers is devoted to the experimental and theoretical study of the flow of partially ionized gases. Subsequent contributions treat modern computational techniques for 3-D hypersonic flow. Non-equilibrium vibrational kinetics are then described, together with the coupling of vibration-dissociation processes as they affect hypersonic flows. Special emphasis is given to the interfacing of non-equilibrium models with computational fluid dynamics methods. Finally, the last part of the book deals with the application of direct Monte Carlo methods in describing rarefied flows.