Rotational nonequilibrium in cw chemical lasers

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Abstract
By including the spontaneous emission term in the radiative transfer equation, an explicit expression for the radiation term in the species equation is obtained in terms of the fluid variables. This formulation is used to study the role of rotational nonequilibrium in cw chemical lasers. It is shown that the phenomena of J shifting and the power being contained in the high J transitions are consequences of the rotational equilibrium assumption. When rotational nonequilibrium is allowed to occur, several J transitions within a given vibrational band lase simultaneously, most of the power is contained in those J transitions that are preferentially populated by the pumping reaction, and the power is decreased by 20%–30% from the rotational equilibrium value. Agreement between the predicted and observed lasing transitions in HF lasers is obtained.

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