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Inconsistent declaration of unit for the Lennard-Jones well depth #239

Closed dventuri closed 1 year ago

dventuri commented 1 year ago

Looking at the Cantera documentation, one finds the Lennard Jones well depth defined as [K] in https://cantera.org/documentation/docs-2.6/sphinx/html/yaml/species.html#gas-transport.

But at the doxygen page documentation, the same parameter is indicated as using [J] unit, see: https://cantera.org/documentation/docs-2.6/doxygen/html/d1/d10/classCantera_1_1GasTransportData.html#pub-attribs

speth commented 1 year ago

The first link is for the YAML input format, which explains:

Species transport properties are a rare exception to Cantera’s use of SI units, and use the units in which these properties are customarily reported. No conversions are supported.

In this customary unit system, the L-J well depth is given in kelvin.

The second link describes how Cantera stores this value internally. Since the value is used as an energy, it is converted to joules using the Boltzmann constant as the conversion factor.