ON SOLAR CORONAL HEATING EFFICIENCY FOR AC AND DC MECHANISMS

Ionson (1985) has extended his unified theory of coronal resonance hea ting composed of DC- and multiharmonic AC- components. While this theo ry gives reasonable dissipation rates for a wide range of physical sit uations, we find that for a significant range of possible loop lengths and dissipation rates the theory breaks down, because in these cases the coronal heating flux would be larger than the input flux due to ph otospheric footpoint motion. We confirm Ionson's (1984, 1985) results that for short dissipation times DC heating and short loop lengths and for long dissipation times AC heating and long loop lengths are favou red.