Numerical Simulation of Temperature Field and Temperature Control of DC Arc Plasma Torch

Abstract

In order to study and analyze the internal heat transfer process of DC arc plasma torch, a two-dimensional axisymmetric model of DC arc plasma torch was established based on magnetohydrodynamics and heat transfer theory. The finite element analysis software COMSOL was used to simulate the temperature field under different conditions. The results show that when the terminal current is constant, the DC plasma arc voltage and the average temperature of the torch outlet increase with the increase of nitrogen standard flow rate, and the maximum temperature in the plasma torch decreases with the increase of nitrogen standard flow rate. When the standard flow rate of nitrogen is constant, the arc voltage decreases with the increase of arc current, and the average temperature of plasma torch exit and the maximum temperature in the torch increase with the increase of arc current. The analysis of simulation data provides theoretical guidance for the temperature control of experimental DC plasma torch.

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“…Therefore, the flow inside the plasma torch requires a multifield coupling method. At present, a common method is to directly use multifield coupling commercial simulation software to simulate the plasma by coupling the electric field, magnetic field, flow, and heat transfer, such as COMSOL Multiphysics software [4][5][6][7]. Alternatively, another method is to simulate the fluid flow based on commercial CFD (computational fluid dynamics) software through user-defined physical parameters, such as using a UDS (user-defined scaler), a UDM (user-defined memory), and source terms, and adjusted macros that are included in the UDF (user-defined function) in the ANSYS Fluent to consider electric and magnetic fields and their coupling with flow and heat transfer [8][9][10][11][12].…”