Enhance lxcat2yaml.py by adding an option to obtain elastic collision cross sections from effective cross sections

[BangShiuh]

Abstract

lxcat data uses different system to account for the elastic collision. The first one is to use directly the elastic collision cross section. The second one is to use the effective collision cross section. The effective cross section is the total cross section which includes elastic and inelastic cross sections. The elastic cross section can be obtained by substracting the inelastic cross section from the effective cross section. Since the electron energy levels can be different for the effective cross section and the inelastic cross section, the inelastic cross section needs to be interpolated forst onto the electron energy grid of the effective cross section.

Motivation

Make Cantera compatible to both using effective and elastic cross section data systems.

• What problem is it trying to solve?
  Enhance to current feature for ease of use.
• Who is affected by the change?
  Only the plasma simulation workflow
• Why is this a good solution?
  This enhancement allows Cantera to use both elastic and effective cross section data without needing to identify "elastic" and "effective" for the electron collision plasma reactions.

Possible Solutions

As described above, we need to add the parsing code to obtain the elastic cross section from an effective cross section.

References

Links to related Pull Requests, GitHub Issues, Users' Group topics, or other relevant material.