I. Armenise's research while affiliated with Consorzio Interuniversitario Nazionale per la Scienza e Tecnologia dei Materiali and other places

... [8][9][10][11] Further applications of C/C composites are mainly restricted by incomplete knowledge of the gas-surface interactions, which consist of complex physico-chemical processes including sublimation, oxidation, nitridation, and catalysis. [12][13][14][15][16][17][18] For the first three reaction types, 5 reactions occur between the flow particles and C/C surface. Products from these reactions couple to the chemically reactive boundary layer, forming a mutually interactive dynamic interface. ...

... This vibrational induced dissociation process has a maximum threshold energy of 5.5 eV, lower than the threshold values of the dissociation cross sections by electron impact, increasing the energy efficiency of CO 2 dissociation. For this reason, a strong interest in the scientific community has been channeled towards the investigation of the conditions in which vibrational excitation can be maximized in non-equilibrium plasma discharges for a more energy efficient CO 2 dissociation [1]. ...

... the vibrational-translational, VT a , energy transitions due to the collisions between an atom and a molecule 60,[79][80][81][82] ...

... But, in all of these studies, the transport of suprathermal N atoms in the planetary upper atmosphere was not taken into account. Reaction (3) was extensively studied in both experimental (see, e.g., [39]) and theoretical (see, e.g., [40][41][42][43]) investigations. In the paper [44], the following value of 1.45 × 10 −16 T 1.6 × e −2894/T cm 3 molecule −1 s −1 at temperatures of 300-5000 K of the rate coefficient for reaction (3) was provided as an approximation of the experimental measurements and theoretical calculations. ...

... Another interesting approach is followed by Armenise and Kustova [27,[151][152][153], who have developed a state-to-state relaxation model which takes into account a more complete vibrational energy ladder for CO2, with several thousands of levels, to study the vibrational kinetics in the hypersonic boundary layer of reentering bodies in the Mars atmosphere. They recommend the use of the Treanor and Marrone model [154] allowing for dissociation from any vibrational state [155] and 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 A c c e p t e d M a n u s c r i p t suggest that the ladder climbing model based on the asymmetric vibrational mode significantly underpredicts the dissociation rate in Mars retry conditions. ...

... Another interesting approach is followed by Armenise and Kustova [27,[151][152][153], who have developed a state-to-state relaxation model which takes into account a more complete vibrational energy ladder for CO2, with several thousands of levels, to study the vibrational kinetics in the hypersonic boundary layer of reentering bodies in the Mars atmosphere. They recommend the use of the Treanor and Marrone model [154] allowing for dissociation from any vibrational state [155] and 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 A c c e p t e d M a n u s c r i p t suggest that the ladder climbing model based on the asymmetric vibrational mode significantly underpredicts the dissociation rate in Mars retry conditions. ...

... Depending mainly on the electron temperature [20], NTPs can selectively transfer energy from the electrons (gaining energy from the electric fied) to the heavy particles in the plasma to initiate certain chemical processes like the dissociation of CO2 with lower energy compared to conventional methods [21]. CO2 dissociation has been the focus of many studies, exploring electron-impact [22][23][24], vibrationally driven [19,[24][25][26][27] and thermal [28][29][30] dissociation routes. ...

... Also, these collisions are of particular interest to environmental chemistry and hypersonic flight regimes. Considering this importance, O( 3 P) + N 2 collisions have been studied experimentally and theoretically by several authors (Hong et al. 2021;Yokota et al. 2021;Balakrishnan et al. 1998a;Balakrishnan & Dalgarno 2003;Upschulte et al. 1992;Oakes et al. 1994;Walch & Jaffe 1987;Gilibert et al. 1992;Bose & Candler 1996;Koner et al. 2020;Esposito & Armenise 2017;Jo et al. 2022). Walch & Jaffe (1987) conducted CASSCF/CCI calculations using extensive Gaussian basis sets to examine certain segments of the potential energy surfaces associated with the Zeldovich mechanism, which involves the transformation of N 2 into NO. ...

... The vehicle surface must be cooled to limit the temperature in order to avoid damage, breakage and interior overheating. Therefore, in the proximity of the wall, due to diffusion and thermal conductivity, a boundary layer is formed, showing again non-equilibrium conditions [3][4][5]. Some materials cool the surface by ablation, introducing further complexity in the model [6]. ...

... Multitemperature models [1,2,4,5,6], although being able to capture the generic non-equilibrium effects, still fail to describe the flow domains where the distributions over internal states are far from the Boltzmann distribution. Under such conditions, implementation of state-to-state models provides much better accuracy [7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15]. The main issues in applying the state-to-state approach in aerothermodynamics of space vehicles are (1) high computational costs for the production terms calculation preventing the use of the state-to-state models in 2D and 3D flow simulations even for an inviscid Euler approximation; (2) complexity of the calculation of state-resolved transport coefficients, especially multi-component diffusion coefficients for each pair of vibrational states [16,17]. ...