Industrial Arc Instrumentation

Hitherto the instrumentation of moving arcs has been neglected and photographic methods have mainly been used to determine arc velocities. Furthermore, previous arc research has been confined, in the main, to high-speed arcs (greater than 10 ft/s) in circuit breaking and similar applications. This paper considers, for the first time, the slowly moving arc (about 1 ft/min) associated with such industrial processes as welding, profile cutting, zone refining, etc. New arc instrumentation methods have been developed for these arc velocities. They use analog and digital techniques. These new methods are simple, yet sufficiently accurate for sophisticated industrial applications. Typical results are given.