Effect of water vapor on the ionic composition of the hydrogen beam-plasma discharge

Abstract

The effect of optimization of the ionic composition of the hydrogen beam-plasma discharge (BPD) in the proton component when filling water vapor into the setup vacuum chamber is described. Experiments for studying the effect of controllable filling of water vapor on properties of highly nonequilibrium plasma show that under certain conditions the discharge ionic composition is redistributed toward increasing the atomic ion fraction. It is assumed that this effect is caused by the interaction of water vapor with the wall of the vacuum chamber of the plasma setup, which results in surface oxidation and a decrease in the recombination coefficient. Furthermore, the presence of active OH radical shifts chemical equilibrium toward increasing the atomic ion fraction.

On the Possibility of Using Water As a Propellant for Powerful Plasma Thrusters

“…The wave is electrostatic near the electrodes end purely electromagnetic near the This self-oscillating discharge regime was obtained for various electrode materials (aluminum, tungsten, tantalum, stainless steel with a silicon oxide film) for hydrogen, deuterium and oxygen as working gases. The use of a water vapor source with the required capacity, as was done in [14], will make it possible to investigate in such a system a helical discharge in water vapor.…”

Diagnostics of ion fluxes in low-temperature laboratory and industrial plasmas

“…Custom-built configurations have also been reported [3,5,8,9]. For example, in [9] the ionizer of the quadrupole residual gas analyzer RGA-100 was replaced with a three-electrode extraction system and used as an in situ ion mass spectrometer to study the ion fluxes from hollow cathode glow discharge plasma.…”