Partition functions of atomic and diatomic species in high-temperature atmospheric plasmas

Accurate atomic and diatomic partition functions are required to determine the level populations for the calculations of radiative properties in thermodynamic equilibrium and nonequilibrium plasmas produced by various atmospheric re-entries. In this work, a reliable partition functions database was rebuilt for some atomic and diatomic species from 100 K to 50000 K. The atomic partition functions were obtained by a four-level model, while the diatomic partition functions were predicted based upon a more rigorous approach for the computation of the energy levels. Compared with previous publications, the number of diatomic electronic states considered in our work is as large as possible. Estimates are made for the contributions of each electronic state of the diatomic molecule to the partition function. Moreover, the effect of the number of electronic states on the partition function was also evaluated. Finally, we calculated the specific heat based upon the obtained partition functions. All the results were validated by the available data in recent references and the relative errors were systematically analysed.