Formulation and numerical analysis of diatomic molecular dissociation using Boltzmann kinetic equation.

The direct description of chemical reactions by the Boltzmann equation still involves some difficulties in the kinetic theory. In this paper, we describe diatomic molecular dissociation due to transitions of vibrational quantum states resulting from inelastic collisions. These can be described by the Wang Chang-Uhlenbeck (WCU) equation. To avoid direct evaluation of the strong nonlinear collision kernel of the WCU equation, we used a kinetic equation. For accurate description of the dissociation process, we describe improvements we made to the conventional inelastic collision model (the so-called Morse model). Combining this inelastic collision model with the gas mixture model by Oguchi, we formulated a model for representing diatomic molecular dissociations. We validated this model by simulating a hypersonic shock layer with diatomic molecular dissociation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]