Introduction to Reactive Gas Dynamics

In high energy gas flows, at high velocities and high temperatures, physical and chemical processes such as molecular vibrational excitation, dissociation, ionisation or various reactions take place and deeply influence the structure of the flows. The characteristic times of these processes have the same order of magnitude as aerodynamic characteristic times, so that these reactive media are generally in thermodynamic and chemical non-equilibrium. This book presents a generalintroductory study of these media. In the first part their fundamental statistical aspects are described, starting from