High Fidelity Modeling of Thermal Relaxation and Dissociation of Oxygen

The rovibrational relaxation of oxygen in a heat bath of parent atoms is studied by means of master equations.It is found that vibrational and rotational relaxation times exhibit a pattern inherent in a chemically reactive collisional pair.An intrinsic feature of the O3 molecular system with a large attractive potential is a weak temperature dependence of the rovibrational transition rates.For this reason, the quasi-steady vibrational and rotational temperatures experience a maximum at increasing translational temperature.The average loss of internal energy due to dissociation quickly diminishes at high temperatures, compared to other molecular systems.The present quasi-steady dissociation rate coefficients are utilized to validate the accuracy of the multi-temperature model.