Measurement of electrical conductivity of high-temperature weakly nonideal insulator vapors

Summary form only given. Successful measurements of the electrical conductivity of weakly non-ideal partially ionized complex plasma mixtures generated from dielectric materials are presented. The complex multi-component, partially ionized vapors were generated using an electrothermal (ET) plasma source operated in the ablation controlled arc regime where the compound dielectric materials were used as the liner of the capillary wall serving as the source of plasma species. The measured discharge current is used in conjunction with the active or pure resistive part of the recoded discharge voltage to calculate the electrical conductivity as a function of time. A comprehensive one-dimensional time-dependent computer code with radiation transport, which uses the recovered Ohmic input power as the only driving force of the computations, is used to report the corresponding plasma state. Measurements in the temperature range 11,000-16,200 K and density range 0.1-25 kg/m3 were performed and the results are presented, discussed and compared to theoretical predictions.