Understanding and modeling the energy transfer between colliding particles at elevated temperatures and high convective speed is crucial to the design of aircrafts and the control of energy flows. The high impact energy of colliding particles which leads to excessive heating can be dissipated by employing design strategies. To advance the engineering of hypersonic aircrafts, the underlying processes are modeled in a multi-scale collaborative research project, bridging fluid dynamics, shock tube experiments, and theoretical chemistry. In the theoretical chemistry part of the project, we simulate the scattering of a chemically inert atom with a diatom at very high impact energies. For the collision event, reaction rates and scattering cross sections are computed. Our calculated rates will serve as input parameters in fluid dynamics simulations, and be validated against shock tube experiments. We investigate the effect of nonequilibrium energy distributions between the participating degrees of freedom in the collision. The reaction rates are obtained using accurate quantum and classical methods, and are compared to rates computed by approximate methods such as transition state theory.

Energy transfer in nonequilibrium air: Reaction dynamics under extreme conditions

247th National Meeting (2014)

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