Metal plasma jet passage through plasma-optical transport system

On the structure and properties of a material deposited from arc discharge plasma near the cathode and onto vacuum-chamber walls

“…This indicates the charge state of the droplet fraction of the arc discharge plasma near the cathode and its interaction with the external magnetic and electric fields. The similar behavior of ion currents was observed in [11] when studying metal plasma motion through a plasma optical system (Fig. 2).…”

Charge separation of plasma flow in curvilinear magnetic field

“…Recently, we have suggested [2] to use an analogous system for separating a multicomponent metal plasma ion flow with respect to masses and demonstrated that flows generated by two cathodes made of elements with different atomic masses are actually shifted in space relative to each other at the system output. At the same time, it is known that cathode plasma flows contain ions in various charged states.…”

“…Ring anode 2 with an inner diam eter of 60 mm was connected to a vacuum chamber that was evacuated to a residual pressure not exceeding 2 × 10 -3 Pa. It was previously demonstrated [2,3] that a metal plasma jet generated on the cathode surface passes via the anode hole and moves along the lines of a magnetic flux tube originating from the working cathode surface. The magnetic field was generated by five solenoids, three of which (3)(4)(5) were coaxial and the axis of other two (6) was perpendicular to that of the first three.…”

“…In the analysis of obtained results, we should take into account that, according to estimations, electrons under the experimental conditions studied are magne tized, while ions are nonmagnetized [2].In this case, electrons are "bound" to the magnetic field lines and, when the plasma jet moves along the curvilinear tra jectory, an ambipolar electric field is generated that is directed toward the center of curvature and hinders the radial drift of ions under the action of a centrifugal force. In addition, a force related to the gradient of pressure also acts on ions in the transverse direction.…”

“…The setup design has been described in much detail elsewhere [2,3] and is only briefly outlined here. A steady state discharge with a current of 50 A was initi ated at the front edge surface of water cooled cath ode 1 with a working surface diameter of 40 mm (see the inset to Fig.…”