Modelling of a transferred arc in presence of an external magnetic field

Summary form only given. Transferred arcs have been widely studied giving rise to a vast experimental and mathematical modeling literature on the subject. These provide a valuable insight as to the flow, temperature and electromagnetic fields in the arc column. In industrial furnaces, where multiple arcs can be present, the magnetic field created by one are can have an influence on the behavior of the other arcs. To model those interactions, a 3D model is developed with emphasis placed on the formulation of the electromagnetic field equations to obtain a form that would be convenient for both 2D and 3D representation. In order to gain flexibility and to speed up the calculations, the computational fluid dynamics code FLUENT is used. The latter is based on the resolution of the Navier-Stokes equations, using the Patankar control volume method. The electromagnetic fields are represented by three transport equations for the scalar potential /spl phi/ and the two components of the vector potential, Ar and Az. These equations and the source terms representing Joule heating effect, net volumetric emission coefficient and Lorentz forces are added in FLUENT through user-defined subroutines. Other subroutines are also implemented to allow for the variation with temperature and pressure of the thermodynamic and transport properties of the plasma gas.