Supersonic Magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) Power Generation System and Its Preliminary Experiment

Magneto hydrodynamic (MHD) power generation system has an important potential application in high-speed aero craft. According to the principles of MHD power generation, shock tunnel and ionization, a supersonic MHD power generation system is developed and introduced in this paper. Helium is used for driver gas and argon for driven gas. Equilibrium contact surface operating mode is selected to obtain high temperature, and the K₂CO₃ powder seed is added into the driven section so that the supersonic flow is electric. When M=2.0 and B=0.5 T, the power generation system is set up to know the experimental conditions. The nozzle entry total pressure is about 0.35 MPa while total temperature about 3965.1 K, and the nozzle exit velocity is calculated 1530.8 m/s. A preliminary experimental investigation is at length carried out by measuring the voltage and current of the segmented MHD power generation channel. Average electrical conductivity is estimated to be 15 S/m approximately. When load factor is 0.5, the maximum power density of this MHD power generation channel is about 2.195 MW/m³, while the maximum value of enthalpy extraction rate tends to be about 0.255%.