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Owens, Walten

Mechanical Engineering

2011

MS

A 30 kW Inductively Coupled Plasma (ICP) Torch Facility was designed and built at the University of Vermont. An ICP torch is a device that uses a radio frequency to create a high temperature plasma in a flowing gas. The facility at DVM is specifically designed to test new, advanced aerospace materials for thermal protection of hyper velocity vehicles. In addition, the 30kW ICP Torch Facility is designed to allow favorable optical access for various spectroscopic measurement techniques. This thesis covers the basic operating principles, the main design features and initial characterization of the plasma conditions. This was done by using two different heat flux measurement techniques: optical pyrometry of surface temperature and slug calorimetry.