Modeling of plasma arc for the high power arc heater in MATLAB

To better develop the arc heater power-supply system, this paper presents an improved plasma arc model, which is formulated from the famous Mayr and Cassie models. Considering real working conditions, the disturbance created by the unstable mass flow rate is taken into account in the arc model, to improve the accuracy. An 18-pulse thyristor rectifier, with constant current output, is used as the arc heater power-supply. The proposed arc model is established in MATLAB/Simulink and the whole arc heater power system is test implemented. The considerable degree of agreement between the simulated and experimental results shows that this arc model can describe both static and dynamic characteristics of real plasma arc with high accuracy.