Thermodynamic effects of Coulombic interactions in ionized gases

Abstract The deviations from ideality arising from the electrostatic interactions between charged particles in a plasma have been studied by an adaption of the Debye-Huckel theory. The results of the study for represenative systems are presented in the paper. The significant finding is that the composition of equilibrium mixtures shows large deviations from that calculated from ideal gas theory. At sufficiently high ion densities these deviations are large enough to alter the thermodynamic functions of the plasma.