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The metallic vapours (i.e., copper, iron, and silver in this paper) resulting from walls and/or electrode surfaces can significantly affect the characteristics of air plasma. Different from the previous works assuming local thermodynamic equilibrium, this paper investigates the influence of metallic vapours on two-temperature (2 T) air plasma. The 2 T compositions of air contaminated by Cu, Fe, and Ag are first determined based on Saha's and Guldberg-Waage's laws. The thermodynamic properties (including mass density, specific enthalpy, and specific heat) are then calculated according to their definitions. After determining the collision integrals for each pair of species in air-metal mixtures using the newly published methods and source data, the transport coefficients (including electrical conductivity, viscosity, and thermal conductivity) are calculated for air-Cu, air-Fe, and air-Ag plasmas with different non-equilibrium degree θ (Te/Th). The influences of metallic contamination as well as non-equilibrium degree are discussed. It is found that copper, iron, and silver exist mainly in the form of Cu2, FeO, and AgO at low temperatures. Generally, the metallic vapours increase mass density at most temperatures, reduce the specific enthalpy and specific heat in the whole temperature range, and affect the transport properties remarkably from 5000K to 20 000 K. The effect arising from the type of metals is little except for silver at certain temperatures. Besides, the departure from thermal equilibrium results in the delay of dissociation and ionization reactions, leading to the shift of thermodynamic and transport properties towards a higher temperature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diffusion coefficients play an important role in the description of the transport of metal vapours in gas mixtures. This paper is devoted to the calculation of four combined diffusion coefficients, namely, the combined ordinary diffusion coefficient, combined electric field diffusion coefficient, combined temperature diffusion coefficient, and combined pressure diffusion coefficient in SF6-Cu mixtures at temperatures up to 30000 K. These four coefficients describe diffusion due to composition gradients, applied electric fields, temperature gradients, and pressure gradients, respectively. The influence of copper fluoride and sulfide species on the diffusion coefficients is shown to be negligible. The effect of copper proportion and gas pressures on these diffusion coefficients is investigated. It is shown that increasing the proportion of copper generally increases the magnitude of the four diffusion coefficients, except for copper mole fractions of 90% or more. It is further found that increasing the pressure reduces the magnitude of the coefficients, except for the combined temperature diffusion coefficient, and shifts the maximum of all four coefficients towards higher temperatures. The results presented in this paper can be applied to the simulation of high-voltage circuit breaker arcs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]