Investigation of Heat Transfer Regimes in Subsonic Dissociated-Nitrogen Jets of a High-Frequency Induction Plasmatron under Additional Surface Heating by Laser Radiation

Abstract

The heat transfer to a cylindrical water-cooled copper model was experimentally investigated in an induction VGU-4 high-frequency (HF) plasmatron of the Institute for Problems in Mechanics of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The model, 30 mm in diameter, equipped with a calorimetric transducer with a heat-adsorbing graphite surface, 13.8 mm in diameter, was exposed to the surface heating in the combined regime by nitrogen plasma and laser radiation and in the cases of the heating with only laser radiation or a nitrogen plasma jet. The experiments in the HF-plasmatron jets were performed at the pressure in the setup low-pressure chamber p = 1 × 10⁴ Pa, nitrogen mass flow rate G = 2.4 g/s, and the plasmatron HF-generator anode power N_a.p. = 22 kW. It is established that in the chosen experimental regimes the dissociated-nitrogen jet and the high-frequency induction discharge do not produce a considerable effect on the laser beam passing through them. The values of the heat flux density are obtained as functions of the laser radiation power delivered. The subsonic nitrogen plasma flow in the quartz discharge channel and in the low-pressure chamber of the VGU-4 setup is numerically modeled under the experimental conditions basing on the solution of the complete Navier–Stokes equations using the Patankar–Spalding method.