Investigations of a microwave plasma source operating with air, N2, CO2 and argon gases

The present contribution will report on the development of a Microwave Plasma Torch (MPT) at the von Karman institute and on the characterization of subsonic plasma flow of various plasmagene gases (air, N-2, CO2 and Ar) at atmospheric pressure. The aim of this work is to explore plasma flow regimes for a large envelope of operating conditions. Using a conventional arrangement for MPT, including cylindrical open-ended dielectric quartz tube, plasma generated with molecular gases have been found to be homogeneous while with argon filamentary structures have been observed. Electrical characterization of the source has been performed for some operating conditions using forwarded and reflected microwave power monitoring. Comprehensive characterization of the flow by means of high speed imaging has been performed to estimate the effect of the oscillation of the delivered power on plasma jet unsteadiness. Analysis in time and frequency domains of the light intensity recorded at 1 kHz rate is presented. Low resolution Optical Emission Spectroscopy (OES) diagnostic was performed in order to identify typical radiative signature of air, N-2 and CO2 plasma jet. High resolution OES was performed on pure N-2 plasma suitable for thermodynamic characterization using N-2(+) First Negative and N-2 2nd Positive systems. Making the common assumption that the internal energy levels of molecular species are populated according to a Boltzmann distribution and making no assumption concerning the total species concentration similarly to [1], comparisons between measured and calculated radiative signature of molecular systems evidence for the achievement of thermal equilibrium and slight departure to Saha equilibrium.