Abstract
It has been well known that the coating quality of plasma spraying is strongly influenced by instability of jets in plasma spray due to the arc root fluctuation. A three dimensional (3D) unsteady modeling was employed in the research to analyze the arc root fluctuation in a DC non-transferred plasma torch. Numerical calculations on the distribution of gas temperature and velocity in plasma torch were carried out using argon as plasma gas. The electrical current density and potential were also discussed. The results indicate that the fluctuation of arc inside the plasma torch is mainly induced by the movement of the arc root on the anode surface. The arc root moves downstream with the flow of gas, and the arc will warp from the electromagnetic force simultaneous to the movement. While the arc warps close to the anode boundary, a new arc root is formed somewhere upstream of the original attachment. This article represents nature of fluctuation of arc root, also in this paper we will present that the voltage-drop calculated is larger than that measured experimentally based on the hypothesis of local thermodynamic equilibrium.
