J. Rohmann et S. Klagge, COLLISIONLESS CURRENTS FOR CYLINDRIC PROBES IN A PLASMA WITH NON-MAXWELLIAN DISTRIBUTION OF THE ELECTRON-ENERGY, Contributions to Plasma Physics, 33(2), 1993, pp. 111-123
The radial model developed by ALLEN, BOYD, REYNOLDs and CHEN [1, 2] fo
r the ion collection of Langmuir probes is extended to describe the ca
se of a non-Maxwellian distribution of the electron energy. Assuming s
tandard distributions, showing with respect to the Maxwell distributio
n an increasing deficite of fast electrons as the parameter k of the d
istribution increases, the electron-retarded current characteristic, t
he potential distribution and the density profiles for electrons and i
ons in the probe sheath, ion-current characteristics as well as graphs
for the ion-density determination are calculated for different k. It
is shown, that the application of the Chen model (k = 1) in plasma wit
h k > 1 leads only to a small error in the ion-density measurement.