Different cut-off criteria of partition functions have been utilized in order to evaluate the contribution of electronic excitation to thermodynamic properties of high temperature gases (5000 °K to 35 000 °K, 10-2-10 atm). It is shown that properties of single species are strongly affected by the cut-off criterion adopted, i. e. the contribution of electronic excitation to these properties is important. It is also shown that the reported absence of this contribution to total enthalpies and specific heats of plasmas is the result of an almost complete compensation between "reactional" and "frozen" terms which are all dependent on electronic excitation.
It is shown that the reported absence of a contribution of electronic excitation on to the total specific heats of helium and nitrogen (10,000–35,000°K, 10−1−10 atm) should be attributed to the presence of compensation effects among the various terms into which the total specific heat can be separated and that these terms are influenced by the electronic contribution.
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