The computation of hypersonic ionized flows in chemical and thermal nonequlibrium

A numerical method to compute a two-dimensional hypersonic flowfield that is ionized and in thermochemical nonequilibrium has been developed. Such a flowfield is described by coupled time-dependent partial differential equations for the conservation of species mass, mass-average momentum, vibrational energy of each diatomic species, electron energy, and total mass-averaged energy. The steady-state solution to these fully coupled equations is obtained using an implicit Gauss-Seidel line relaxation technique. The computed electron densities in the flowfield compare well with experimental results.