Unified fluid model analysis and benchmark study for electron transport in gas and liquid analogs

Abstract

The interaction of plasmas with liquids requires an understanding of charged particle transport in both the gaseous and liquid phases. In this study we present a generalized fluid-equation framework to describe bulk electron transport in both gaseous and non-polar liquid environments under non-hydrodynamic non-equilibrium conditions. The framework includes liquid structural effects through appropriate inclusion of coherent scattering effects and adaption of swarm data to account for the modification to the scattering environment present in such systems. In the limit of low-densities it reduces to the traditional gas-phase fluid-equation model. Using a higher-order fluid model (four moments), it is shown that by applying steady state electron swarm data in both the gaseous and liquid phases, to close the system of equations and evaluate collisional rates, an improvement in macroscopic electron transport results over popular existing assumptions used. The failure of the local mean energy approximation in fluid models to accurately describe complex spatial oscillatory structures in both the gaseous and liquid phases is discussed in terms of the spatial variation of the electron distribution function itself.