The effect of electron emission processes on micro- and nanoparticle charges in the dusty plasma for engineering applications

Abstract

In this paper, the charge-balance, the energy-balance and the moment equations and Poisson's equation have been used to describe the charging process for a dust particle in the undisturbed plasma taking into account the emission variety (secondary electron, electron-ion, thermal-field electron and photoelectron types) in the intermediate regime of ion motion. Such an approach was associated with the fact that the dust-particle charge specified by the parameters of the above-mentioned plasma depends heavily on electron emission from the particle surface. Collisions between ions and atoms as well as ionization also essentially affect the formation of the ion flux onto the surface of dust particles. The computational procedure we propose has allowed solving the chosen set of equations for an arbitrary relationship between the ion mean free path, the particle radius and the Debye length. The electron emission was shown to decrease the absolute value of the dust-particle charge. Moreover, the collisions with atoms lead to the ion flux deceleration onto the particle surface whereas the depth of the disturbance space of plasma increased with decreasing the ionization frequency.