Laser-sustained plasmas in forced convective argon flow. II - Comparison of numerical model with experiment

A two-dimensional laser-sustained plasma model, which is based on the laminar, Navier-Stokes equations for the flow and geometric ray tracing for the laser beam, has been evaluated and compared with existing experimental results for a wide range of forced convective argon flows. The influence of gas inlet velocity, gas pressure, laser power, and focusing geometry on the structure of the plasma was examined. The model agreed well with the existing experimental data in both global structure and detailed temperature distribution, particularly for static pressures greater than 2 atm. It was found that the diffusion approximation for the optically thick portion of the thermal radiation was not adequate for low-pressure (less than 2 atm) plasmas and that the radiationinduced thermal conductivity had to be adjusted in order to obtain agreement between the model calculations and experimental results. The present model calculations were also compared with a recently published semitwo-dimensional model and the results indicate that the existing one-dimensional and semi-two-dimensional models do not provide adequate solutions for the laser-sustained plasma.