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The Aurora Software is a FORTRAN computer program that predicts the steady-state or time-averaged properties of a well mixed or perfectly stirred reactor for plasma or thermal chemistry systems. The software was based on the previously released software, Surface PSR, which was written for application to thermal CVD reactor systems. Aurora allows modeling of non-thermal, plasma reactors with the determination of ion and electron concentrations and the electron temperature, in addition to the neutral radical species concentrations. Well stirred reactors are characterized by a reactor volume, residence time or mass flow rate, heat loss or gas temperature, surface area, surface temperature, the incoming temperature and mixture composition, as well as the power deposited into the plasma for non-thermal systems. The model described here accounts for finite-rate elementary chemical reactions both in the gas phase and on the surface. The governing equations are a system of nonlinear algebraic relations. The program solves these equations using a hybrid Newton/time-integration method embodied by the software package Twopnt. The program runs in conjunction with the new Chemkin-III and Surface Chemkin-III packages, which handle the chemical reaction mechanisms for thermal and non-thermal systems. Chemkin-III allows for specification of electron-impact reactions, excitation losses, and elastic-collision losses for electrons.

The development of the Aurora code has been supported in part by a cooperative research agreement between the U. S. Department of Energy and SEMATECH, contract number DE-F104-89AL58872.

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