Research on non-thermal flow field characteristics of a three-phase rotary arc plasma exciter in aero-engine combustor

This paper describes the design of a three-phase rotary arc exciter based on the principle of plasma-assisted combustion and presents analysis on the operation characteristics of it. A dual-stage swirler and a three-phase arc exciter is integrated by mounting three needle electrodes on the internal surface of Venturi tube of the swirler uniformly. In this work, the arc development process was studied and the influence of discharge on main flow field was obtained. Moreover, the species and intensity of active particles generated by discharge were analyzed. It is found that the three-phase rotary arc exciter transits between two discharge mode due to variations of air flow rates. The application of three-phase rotating gliding arc discharge reduces the turbulent intensity. Plasma discharge of the exciter could generate excited-state nitrogen molecules N2(C3Π), oxygen molecules O2(a1Δg), and other reactive particles, which has been verified to be beneficial to combustion chemical reactions.