Simplified measurement of plasma temperatures without Abel inversion

Summary form only given. In cases of spatially unstable discharges it would be difficult to make collimated measurements of lateral intensities along fixed discharge chords as required by the Abel technique. In the present work, it has been demonstrated that, without using the Abel inversion and in a simple experimental set-up, it is possible to find the temperature at the center of the plasma column by measuring the total line radiation intensities integrated over the plasma diameter. The proposed approach has been used to measure the center temperature of a plasma jet using lines of copper eroded from the anode and air plasma torch