Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 August 2015
The heating of the solar corona and the solar wind phenomenon are basically related, however, the two parts are generally modelised independently: the models of the transition zone and corona are restricted to levels lower than the temperature maximum and the solar wind models begin above it. Here we study a self-consistent oversimplified model which maintains the global balance of energy sources and sinks from the chromospheric level to the interplanetary medium. The heating mechanism chosen is the shock wave dissipation; it was shown by Gonczi et al (1977) that overlapping shock waves could carry a significant mechanical energy flux towards a static corona; here we apply the same mechanism to an expanding corona. The model includes self-consistently the different coupling between convective energy flux, conductive flux, radiative losses in optically thin atmosphere, shock wave pressure and dissipation terms. The input parameters are the base pressure, the base temperature and the mechanical flux introduced at chromospheric level in form of shock waves. If these three parameters allow a solar wind expansion, the output results are the radial variations of the density, of the temperature, of the solar wind velocity and of the mechanical flux. Due to the presence of a boundary layer associated to the steep temperature gradient in the transition zone, the three input parameters cannot be arbitrarily fixed, in fact when we impose two of them, the third one cannot vary within a large interval (i.e. within a factor of two or less), this point has been qualitatively discussed in a previous paper : Couturier et al. (1979)