Online

Jagun, Precious T.

Mechanical Engineering

2020

M.S.

In previous studies done at the University of Vermont's Inductively coupled Plasma (ICP) touch facility, the plasma conditions were always assumed to be in Local Thermodynamic Equilibrium(LTE) state. To improve the knowledge of the thermodynamic properties of the plasma conditions, in this study, experiments and analysis were conducted to determine whether or not the facility is indeed in LTE. LIF data was collected at 7mm off the exit of the quartz tube and compared with CEA simulations for the same plasma conditions. The facility was also better characterized by using LTE analyses of the absolute emission intensities to determine the temperatures and enthalpies of the plasmas at the 7mm location. This will improve baseline data for CFD modeling of the facility. Further work has been done to develop a quasi-steady injection probe to replicate the pyrolysis of PICA to enable better characterization of the evolution of the pyrolysis products as they react with plasma gases. This probe, which was designed, built and modified in previous works done at UVM, has been used to inject mixtures with different volumetric rations of Carbon Dioxide and Hydrogen gases into pure Argon and argon diluted Nitrogen and air plasmas. Spatially resolved, point-wise, line of sight emission measurements were taken in the boundary layer region and was used to characterize the spatial evolution of the different mixtures of carbon dioxide and hydrogen as they are injected into different plasma. These results were then compared to temporally resolved PICA emission data taken in a previous study. A better match was found for the comparison between the PICA data and the emission data from the injected mixtures.