EFFICIENT COMPUTATIONAL MODEL FOR INDUCTIVE PLASMA FLOWS

摘要

A new approach to the numerical modeling of high-pressure inductive plasmas is presented. The governing magneto-hydrodynamic equations are discretized in a second-order accurate finite volume manner. A pressure-stabilized flowfield solver is introduced as an alternative to the staggered-mesh solvers used in traditional algorithms. It is argued that the widely used integral boundary formulation for the electric field is computationaly expensive and cannot be incorporated into an efficient iterative solution procedure. A far-field formulation of the electric field is adopted instead, such that state-of-the-art iterative methods can be applied to speed up the calculation. The discredtized equations are solved through a damped Picard method and an approximate and a full Newton method.