The chemical evolution of gas-rich dwarf galaxies

A numerical double burst model of the chemical evolution of gas-rich dwarf galaxies has been developed. The model is fitted to a sample of N/O, O/H, Y and gas fraction observations, where N/O and O/H are the relative abundances by number of nitrogen to oxygen and oxygen to hydrogen, respectively. Y is the abundance by mass of helium. Closed models as well as models including enriched outflow, ordinary outflow and ordinary outflow combined with inflow are considered.The bursts are assumed to be instantaneous but ordered in pairs to explain the scatter in N/O-O/H. The method of gas fraction fitting is revised, and it is found that it is very important to specify whether dwarf irregulars (dIrrs) or blue compact galaxies (BCGs) are considered. Effective enriched winds fail when fitting N/O, whereas closed models, models with ordinary winds or a combination of ordinary winds and inflow are all viable.Comment: 22 pages, 25 figures, MNRAS LaTeX forma