Modeling on rapid ablation/sublimation from the surface of solid particles injected into thermal plasmas

Summay form only give. Thermal plasmas are often used in materials processing technologies, e.g., plasma spray, powder spheroidization, etc. The raw materials are normally injected into the plasma in the form of powders, which are then accelerated, heated, melted and evaporated. Evaporation/sublimation affects the interaction between the materials and thermal plasmas. Furthermore, evaporation/sublimation modifies the gas flow and temperature fields around the surface of the particles. To understand these complex phenomena, it is of great importance to model the interactions including phase transition, between solid, gas and plasmas in a self- consistent manner. In this work, we have developed a computational model to study the evaporation/ablation of graphite particles immersed in a thermal plasma. Carbon particle sublimation injected into thermal plasmas was simulated using the CIP-CUP method, which is a unified solver for incompressible and compressible flows including different phases of matter. In addition, the volume of fluid (VOF) function was adopted to track the boundary between solid and gas. The gas flow and temperature fields were obtained during the sublimation.