Molecular Relaxation in Supersonic Free Jets of N2 and CH4 from Stimulated Raman Spectroscopy and Time-of-Flight Measurements

Calculation of the transport and relaxation properties of methane. II. Thermal conductivity, thermomagnetic effects, volume viscosity, and nuclear-spin relaxation

Transport properties of pure methane have been calculated in the rigid-rotor approximation using the recently proposed intermolecular potential energy hypersurface [R. Hellmann et al., J. Chem. Phys. 128, 214303 (2008)] and the classical-trajectory method. Results are reported in the dilute-gas limit for the temperature range of 80-1500 K. The calculated thermal conductivity values are in very good agreement with the measured data and correlations. In the temperature range of 310-480 K the calculated values underestimate the best experimental data by 0.5%-1.0%. We suggest that the calculated values are more accurate, especially at low and high temperatures, than the currently available correlations based on the experimental data. Our results also agree well with measurements of thermal transpiration and of the thermomagnetic coefficients. We have shown that although the dominant contribution to the thermomagnetic coefficients comes from the Wjj polarization in the spherical approximation, the contribution of a second polarization, Wj, cannot be neglected nor can a full description of the Wjj polarization. The majority of the volume viscosity measurements around room temperature are consistent with the calculated values but this is not the case at high and low temperatures. However, for nuclear-spin relaxation the calculated values consistently exceed the measurements, which are mutually consistent within a few percent.

Low-Temperature Rotational Relaxation of CO in Self-Collisions and in Collisions with Ne and He

The low-temperature rotational relaxation of CO in self-collisions and in collisions with the rare-gas atoms Ne and He has been investigated in supersonic expansions with a combination of resonance-enhanced multiphoton ionization (REMPI) spectroscopy and time-of-flight techniques. For the REMPI detection of CO, a novel 2 + 1' scheme has been employed through the A(1)Pi state of CO. From the measured data, average cross sections for rotational relaxation have been derived as a function of temperature in the range 5-100 K. For CO-Ne and CO-He, the relaxation cross sections grow, respectively, from values of approximately 20 and 7 A(2) at 100 K to values of approximately 65-70 and approximately 20 A(2) in the 5-20 K temperature range. The cross section for the relaxation of CO-CO grows from a value close to 40 A(2) at 100 K to a maximum of 60 A(2) at 20 K and then decreases again to 40 A(2) at 5 K. These results are qualitatively similar to those obtained previously with the same technique for N(2)-N(2), N(2)-Ne, and N(2)-He collisions, although in the low-temperature range (T < 20 K) the CO relaxation cross sections are significantly larger than those for N(2). Some discrepancies have been found between the present relaxation cross sections for CO-CO and CO-He and the values derived from electron-induced fluorescence experiments.

Spatially resolved gas phase composition measurements in supersonic flows using tunable diode laser absorption spectroscopy

We used a tunable diode laser absorption spectrometer to follow the condensation of D(2)O in a supersonic Laval nozzle. We measured both the concentration of the condensible vapor and the spectroscopic temperature as a function of position and compared the results to those inferred from static pressure measurements. Upstream and in the early stages of condensation, the quantitative agreement between the different experimental techniques is good. Far downstream, the spectroscopic results predict a lower gas phase concentration, a higher condensate mass fraction, and a higher temperature than the pressure measurements. The difference between the two measurement techniques is consistent with a slight compression of the boundary layers along the nozzle walls during condensation.