Heat Conductivity in Polyatomic or Electronically Excited Gases. II

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Abstract
The usual Eucken equation for the heat conductivity of a molecule with internal degrees of freedom is derived and improved. In the improved form the correction to the coefficient of thermal conductivity for the internal degrees of freedom of the molecule is given by the factor 0.115+0.354 Cp/R. With the help of Part I, we prove that this approximation is valid only if the electronic states are not metastable and if the coefficients of diffusion of all the molecular quantum states are equal. The metastable electronic species should lead to anomalously large coefficients of thermal conductivity, whereas the usual excited electronic states, because of their gigantic size, should give a much smaller contribution to the coefficient of thermal conductivity than would be expected on the basis of the Eucken assumption.