Efficient Approach to Description of Heat Transfer and Multicomponent Diffusion in Ionized Gases

Abstract

The formulas for the heat fluxes of heavy components and electrons as well as the Stefan–Maxwell relations for the diffusion fluxes in amagnetic field are derived for amulticomponent two-temperature plasma with regard to the higher-order approximations in orthogonal expansions of the component distribution functions in Sonine polynomials. For the complex transport coefficients of heavy components and electrons exact formulas are obtained in the significantly simpler form as compared with the standard procedure of the Chapman–Enskog method with the minimum number of minimum-order matrix inversions.