Ion swarm data for electrical discharge modeling in air and flue gas mixtures

The first step of this work is the determination of the elastic and inelastic ion-molecule collision cross sections for the main ions (N2+, O2+, CO2+, H2O+ and O−) usually present either in the air or flue gas discharges. The obtained cross section sets, given for ion kinetic energies not exceeding 100 eV, correspond to the interactions of each ion with its parent molecule (symmetric case) or nonparent molecule (asymmetric case). Then by using these different cross section sets, it is possible to obtain the ion swarm data for the different gas mixtures involving N2, CO2, H2O and O2 molecules whatever their relative proportions. These ion swarm data are obtained from an optimized Monte Carlo method well adapted for the ion transport in gas mixtures. This also allows us to clearly show that the classical linear approximations usually applied for the ion swarm data in mixtures such as Blanc’s law are far to be valid. Then, the ion swarm data are given in three cases of gas mixtures: a dry air (80% N2, 20% O2...