Plasma ionization balance in chemical-picture and average-atom models

We propose an approximate method to calculate ion partition functions in the context of the chemicalpicture representation of plasmas as an interacting mixture of various ions and free electrons under the local-thermodynamic-equilibrium conditions. The method uses the superconfiguration approach and implies that the first-order corrections to the energies of excited electron configurations due to the electron-electron interaction may be replaced by a similar first-order correction to the energy of the basic configuration of an ion with the same number of bound electrons. The method enables one to significantly speed up the calculations and generally provides quite accurate results. Using the method proposed, plasma ionization balance and average ion charges calculated on the base of the chemical-picture representation show a good agreement with the relevant average-atom data. For the case of weak electron-ion nonideality, we provide approximate relations between the chemical-picture and average-atom values of the average ion charge, chemical potential, and plasma-density depression of ionization potential.