Thermal Nonequilibrium Simulation of an Arc Plasma Jet

The characteristics of plasma jets produced by direct-current nontransferred arc torches depend strongly on the dynamics of the arc inside the torch, which act as forcing mechanisms for the jet. Three-dimensional and time-dependent results of a two-temperature model that is applied to the simulation of the flow inside a plasma torch and the generated jet reproduce the large-scale structures of the jet observed experimentally and display marked thermal nonequilibrium in the interface between the jet and the surrounding gas. The large-scale structures of the jet from the numerical results are in qualitative agreement with the experimental high-speed images.