Question about electric field

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Андрей Черепанов

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Nov 8, 2025, 5:31:48 PMNov 8

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Dear developers and users of Cantera Software. I have a question about electric field realization in Cantera. I will relay to this issue: https://github.com/Cantera/cantera/issues/1957 and i have doubled the question from closed issue below there, because i don't know where to ask...
If i correctly understand in provided there simulation Electric field raises up to 300 v/m (3 v/cm). Well for experimentally measured currents in conditions that we are currently studying (just premixed flame on the flat-burner with no induced electric field) we were not able to measure any voltage. All measurements showed that no electric field is found. We also found that ion profiles are sharp and there is no concentration of H3O+ or E- in the beginning zone (except for probe effects of course). I maybe asking a bit silly question. But what even the meaning for the stage=2? Why the frozenionmethod is better describing ion profiles for mass-spectrometry data for stabilized on flat-burner (Botha-Spalding) with no induced electric field. And also is it possible to model a flat flame under 1500 v/cm electric field in cantera 3.2.0b1? Why electricFieldMethod is making this huge field even when cation's concentration are relatively low?
I'll be looking forward for your answer, with best regards!

Ray Speth

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Nov 17, 2025, 5:00:19 PMNov 17

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Hi,

I couldn’t guess why you were not able to measure any voltage in what’s meant to be a similar setup to what’s given in the ion_burner_flame.py example. This example is fairly similar to the one shown in the work of Han et al (2015), where there are plots showing H3O+ and E- concentrations with comparison to some experimental measurements.

In older Cantera versions, the “stage=2” solver option is the one in which the electric field calculation was enabled, and diffusion of ionized species was influenced by this field, while the “stage=1” solution neglected diffusion of ionized species. My understanding of the reason for taking this approach in the first stage is that if the electric field is neglected, diffusion of electrons would be grossly overestimated. In Cantera 3.2.0, these “stages” are now replaced by the electric_field_enabled property, which can be toggled in a manner similar to other solver options like the soret_enabled flag.

I’m not sure why the “frozen ion” method would ever be better at describing any physical phenomena. My interpretation was that it was just a feature to help with numerical convergence in some cases, similar to how we allow solving with the temperature profile fixed first followed by allowing the temperature to evolve.

There is currently no way to set boundary condition for the electric field (i.e., the electric field at the burner surface), but I don’t think that would be terribly difficult to implement.