Book Description

The thermodynamic and transport prorerties of high-temperature air are found in closed form starting from approximate partition functions for the major components in air and neglecting all minor components. The compressibility, energy, entropy, the specific heats, the speed of sound, the coefficients of viscosity and of thermal conductivity, and the Prandtl numbers for air are tabulated from 500 degrees to 15,000 degrees K over a range of pressure from 0.0001 to 100 atmospheres. The enthalpy of air and the mol fractions of the major components of air can easily be found from the tabulated values for compressibility and energy. It is predicted that the Prandtl number for fully ionized air will become small compared to unity, the order of 0.01, and this implies that boundary layers in such flow will be very transparent to heat flux.