Experimental research of arc heater with three electrodes

Abstract

Abstract As a heat source capable of producing extremely high temperature, the arc heater developed with the development of ballistic missiles and other spacecraft. With the development of hypersonic vehicles, the requirement of thermal protection performance test on ground simulation equipment is higher and higher, the current and power of arc heater are increasing. The traditional single-electrode arc heater can’t run stably for a long time under large current. In order to improve the operation stability of the arc heater under large current, a multi-electrode technique was developed. In this paper, the effects of parameters such as arc current, gas flow rate and resistance on the current distribution of each sub-electrode of the three-electrode arc heater are studied. The results show that when the arc current is constant, increasing the resistance difference of each sub-electrode is beneficial to the average distribution of current. With the increasing of arc current, the current distribution of each sub-electrode is more uniform. The setting of parameters such as arc current, gas flow rate and resistance has great influence on the distribution of cathode current of multi-electrode arc heater, but little influence on the anode.