Enhancement of Heat Transfer Due to Plasma Flow in Material Processing Applications

Abstract

Convective heating is used in materials processing industry for heat treatment and melting applications. Only recently, a new plasma device for convective heating at atmospheric pressure has become commercially available. In this paper, we have investigated heating of an aluminum sprue by conventional convective heating by air and by plasma flow. Transient temperature measurements were made in the sprue interior and the overall heat transfer coefficient was computationally predicted in the two cases. Results show that there is significant enhancement of heat transfer in convective plasma heating compared to heating due to unionized gas under identical flow and temperature conditions. For the cases considered in this study, close to a 60% increase in the heat transfer rate was obtained. The key finding is that even small amount of ionization (~ < 1%) can lead to significant increase in heat transfer coefficient.