Relaxation effects and the thermal conductivity of polyatomic gases and gas mixtures

Abstract

The recent thermal conductivity data of several homonuclear diatomic molecules and a number of binary gas mixtures have been compared with the recent theories of thermal conductivity which take into consideration inelastic effects. For the pure gases the results show the uncertainty in the prediction of the temperature dependence of rotational relaxation times from thermal conductivity data. For binary mixtures the experimental data show the inability of the theory of Monchick, Pereira and Mason (1965) to represent the cross-relaxation effect on thermal conductivity.