The role of superelastic collisions in determining the evolution of gas discharges, when the electric field is calculated self-consistently with the gas composition, has been discussed. The test cases consider an argon discharge sustained by applying a given power density profile and a nitrogen discharge generated by a ns pulse in the presence of the circuit resistance. The results show that in both cases superelastic collisions modify the plasma properties already during the discharge, when the population of excited states grows and starts to affect the evolution of the plasma till complete depletion.

中文翻译：

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关于氩气和氮气放电中超弹性碰撞的相关性

讨论了当电场与气体成分自洽地计算时，超弹性碰撞在确定气体放电过程中的作用。测试案例考虑了通过施加给定的功率密度分布而维持的氩气放电，以及在电路电阻存在的情况下由ns脉冲产生的氮气放电。结果表明，在两种情况下，当激发态总体增长并开始影响等离子体的发展直至完全耗尽时，超弹性碰撞已在放电过程中改变了等离子体的性能。