Image: Energyfig

Description: The above figure was produced by Dr Ian O'Neill and Dr Xing Li during research into the energy balance in a long coronal loop (600 million meters long in this example). This is a modelled coronal loop using a full-implicit, 2-fluid numerical method which solves the basic plasma equations simultaneously. In the figure, the top panel shows the plasma parameters along the coronal loop length, where plasma temperature (T in million Kelvin or 106K), velocity (v in 102 kilometers per second) and pressure (p in dyne per cm-2) are displayed. As can be seen, we are dealing with plasma temperatures of over 1.5MK. The lower panel demonstrates the energy sources (kinetic, gravity, enthalpy, wave fluxes) and energy sinks (conduction, radiation fluxes). With reference to the figure, the followeing energy flux corresponds to different traces on the graph: kinetic energy flux (thin solid line), gravitational flux (dotted), radiative flux (long-dash), conductive flux (short-dash), enthalpy flux (dot-dash), wave flux (triple-dot-dash) and the total flux (thick solid line). The total flux must remain constant to confirm steady state.
Usage Terms: Public domain