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langmuirproject / langmuir

Programmatically accessible current-voltage characteristics for ideal and non-ideal Langmuir probes.
GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0
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Add possibility of supersonic streaming ions. #1

Open sigvaldm opened 6 years ago

sigvaldm commented 6 years ago

This contributes up to ~5% of the total probe current in the ionosphere.

sigvaldm commented 6 years ago

In the ionosphere, there's a drift velocity of roughly 7500 m/s. By comparsion the O+ ions' thermal velocity and sound speed is roughly an order of magnitude less. Neglecting the thermal velocity and assuming a neutral probe (V=0) yields an ion collected current simply as the flux through the cross-section of the probe. This is roughly 5% compared to the electron collected current. As the voltage increase the ion collection is less. The best would of course be to include a sort of OML theory for drifting Maxwellian. Is this feasible?