Study On The Physics Of Ionosphere By Means Of Thermodynamics

The physical process of the ionosphere formation has been the major research of ionosphere physics, where the classic theory is Chapman theory. It gives photoionization rate of neutral atmosphere basing on radiation transfer theory and hydrostatic equilibrium theory, and presents Chapman-αlayer and Chapman-βlayer combined with two different electron loss forms respectively. When the E layer can be explained by Chapman-αlayer directly, both of Chapman-αlayer and Chapman-βlayer can make the F1 layer clear. However, the F2 layer needs to further consider the plasma bipolar diffusion theory to explain reasonably. Since the different layers in ionosphere need different theories to demonstrate, there is no a unified analytic solution for the ionosphere form which makes the study of the ionosphere physics more complex.The first part of this paper is regarding the solar photon as a reactant in the ionosphere photochemical reaction, the reaction degree and chemical equilibrium constant in the low ionosphere, and hence the electron density in the lower ionosphere are obtained by means of the chemical thermodynamics method. The results show that the electron density in the ionosphere derived by thermodynamics methods can be simplified E layer and F layer under certain condition. The conclusions are identical with the theories, proving the feasibility to study the ionosphere formation by the thermodynamics methods. Then we get the unified shape of the ionosphere in different height.The second part of this paper treats photon gas properly and derives the chemical equilibrium constant from statistical physics. The results show that the two equilibrium constants derived from thermodynamic and statistical physics methods have some differents. Further analysis indicates that not all photon energy is converted to ionization energy in the photochemical process, part of the energy is converted into heat or keeping the particles in the excited states. This difference hints a possibility to derive the ionospheric plasma temperature.