Thermal and electrical influences from bulk plasma in cathode heating modeling

Abstract

In this paper, a numerical calculation is performed for the purpose of estimating the thermal and electrical influences from bulk plasma in cathode heating modeling, in other words researching the necessity of a coupling bulk plasma in near-cathode layer modeling. The proposed model applied in the present work is an improved one from previous work.In this model, the near-cathode region is divided into two parts: the sheath and the ionization layer. The Schottky effect at the cathode surface is considered based on the analytic solution of a 1D sheath model. It is noted that the arc column is calculated simultaneously in the near-cathode region and the cathode bulk. An application is presented for an atmospheric free burning argon arc with arc currents of 50 A–600 A.The modeling results show three interesting points: (1) at the cathode surface, energy transport due to heat conduction of heavy particles and electrons is comparable to total heating flux, no matter whether the arc discharge is performed in a high (400 A) or low current (50 A) situation; (2) the electrical influence from bulk plasma on the cathode heating modeling becomes obvious in a high current situation (>400 A) for the spot mode; (3) the near-cathode layer voltage drop () is larger in the diffuse mode than in the spot mode for the same current, which is just the opposite to that for decoupled modeling.