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The capacitively coupled plasma in the gaseous electronics conference reference reactor is numerically investigated for argon flow using a non-equilibrium plasma fluid model. The finite rate chemistry is adopted for the chemical non-equilibrium among species including neutral metastable, whereas a two-temperature model is employed to resolve the thermal non-equilibrium between electrons and heavy species. The predicted plasma density agrees very well with experimental data for the validation case. A strong thermal non-equilibrium is observed between heavy particles and electrons due to its low collision frequency, where the heavy species remains near ambient temperature for low pressure and low voltage conditions (0.1 Torr, 100 V). The effects of the operating parameters on the ion flux are also investigated, including the electrode voltage, chamber pressure, and gas flow rate. It is found that the ion flux can be increased by either elevating the electrode voltage or lowering the gas pressure.

This study proposes a quasi-one-dimensional model to predict the chemical non-equilibrium flow along the stagnation streamline of hypersonic flow past a blunt body. The model solves reduced equations along the stagnation streamline and predicts nearly identical results as the numerical solution of the full-field Navier-Stokes equations. The high efficiency of this model makes it useful to investigate the overall quantitative behavior of related physical-chemical phenomena. In this paper two important properties of hypersonic flow, shock stand-off distance and oxygen dissociation, are studied using the quasi-one-dimensional model with the ideal dissociating gas model. It is found that the shock stand-off distance is affected by both chemical and thermal non-equilibrium. The shock stand-off distance will increase when the flow conditions are changed from equilibrium to non-equilibrium, because the average density of the shock-compressed gas will decrease as a result of the increase in translational energy. For oxygen dissociation, the maximum value of its dissociation degree along the stagnation line varies with the flight altitude. It is increased at first and decreased thereafter with the altitude, which is due to the combination effect of the equilibrium shift and chemical non-equilibrium relaxation. The overall variation of the maximum dissociation is then plotted in the speed and altitude coordinates as a reference for engineering application.