Three-Dimensional Simulation of Plasma Spray Jet

A three-dimensional computational model has been developed to describe the compressible, multi-component, turbulent, reacting plasma jet coupled with the orthogonal injection of carrier gas and particles. This model has been applied to plasma spray process that includes physical phenomena such as heating, melting, accelerating, and evaporation of in-flight particles. The entrained particles, NiCrAlY and ZrO₂, are discretely treated in a Lagrangian coordinate and stochastically generated by sampling from the probability distributions of the particle size and its velocity at the injection nozzle. In this study, special attention has been directed to the effects of carrier gas injection on the characteristics of plasma jet. The computational results show that the injection of carrier gas from the orthogonal injector above the plasma jet introduce the 3-D phenomena of plasma gas flow. The plasma jet is defected and the thermo-fluid flow near the injector is locally deformed.