Experimental Study and Numerical Simulation on Interaction of Plasma Jet and Liquid media

The interaction mechanism of plasma jet with liquid media is one of the most important problems in the study of interior ballistic of electrothermal chemical propulsion. The propagation form and the interaction mechanism of plasma jet in water are studied experimentally in this paper. The plasma jet is generated by the discharging of pulse power in a polyethylene capillary. The construction and consecutive expansion process of plasma jet in water are recorded by high speed digital camera system. The effects of discharge voltage and boundary shape on the propagation form are studied. The expansion velocity of plasma jet in water is gotten. The results indicate that the expansion construction of plasma jet in water is a typical Taylor cavity, the entrainment phenomena of plasma jet to water is visualized in pictures, and there are strong interactions in the surface of Taylor cavity. Based on the experiments, numerical simulations of the interaction of non-steady plasma jet with liquid media are carried out. The change characteristics of pressure and velocity in plasma jet flow field have been obtained.