Nonlinear convective effects on moving boundary AC plasma arcs

The energy equation for an AC plasma arc is cast into a general form, requiring the specification of only two parameters. Based on previous work for a tube model, the AC arc problem with moving boundary is modeled using an adaptive time-step integration scheme. It is found that convection in lower-frequency plasma arcs plays a more important role than for high-frequency arcs. The power factor decreases more significantly for the low-frequency arcs because the convective effect makes the departure of the voltage wave from a sinusoidal wave more significant in this case