ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the flow of a reacting, partially ionized, nonpolarizable, and nonmagnetic N-component gas mixture subject to an electromagnetic field. It presents transport equations – some features of the Navier-Stokes equations. Basically, two methods are available to derive the transport equations. The first – phenomenological – approach employs methods of irreversible thermodynamics and assumes a linear relationship between "fluxes" and their causes, with proportionality coefficients determined from Onsager's reciprocal relations, from experiment, or from kinetic theory. In the second – kinetic – approach, transport equations are obtained as solutions of appropriate kinetic equations. The major source of error in computing transport properties is the uncertainty in the magnitude of collision integrals due to the lack of information about interparticle interactions in the mixture. For a multicomponent gas mixture, the boundary conditions to be satisfied on discontinuity surfaces were obtained by G. A. Tirskii based on the conservation of mass, momentum, and energy.
