Compressibility and heat capacity of rotating plasma

Abstract

A rotating plasma column is shown to exhibit unusual heat capacity effects under compression. For near equilibrium thermodynamics and smooth wall conditions, the heat capacity depends on the plasma density, on the speed of the rotation, and on the mass ratio. For a certain range of parameters, the storage of energy in the electric field produces a significant increase in the heat capacity.

Strategies for advantageous differential transport of ions in magnetic fusion devices

“…A centrifugal potential, for instance, might be set up by generating perpendicular E and B fields. Rotation profiles can also be manipulated with compressional techniques [40,41].…”

Centrifugal instability in the regime of fast rotation

“…Another application of crossed field configurations is plasma rotation control, where the field orientation is chosen so that charged particles drift azimuthally. Plasma rotation holds promise for mass separation applications (see, e. g., Refs [6][7][8][9][10][11][12] ), and has been shown to yield unusual heat capacity effects 13 . In addition, plasma rotation has recently been suggested to compensate the vertical drift associated with toroidal magnetic field in a torus 14 .…”

Fluid Model for the Piezothermal Effect

“…The piezothermal effect is closely related to the physics to the rotation-dependent heat capacity effect also studied by Geyko and Fisch, in which the energy required to compress a rotating cylinder changes when the gas is spinning [2,3]. That effect has applications in engine design, where it could be used to improve the efficiency of Otto and Diesel cycles [4].…”