Simulation Research On High-power Arc Heater System

Plasma wind tunnel is equipment which can generate high-temperature and high-pressure to simulate the air environment of aerospace reentry vehicles. Arc heater system is the most important component of plasma wind tunnel.With the development of aerospace industry in china, higher requirement is proposed to the plasma wind tunnel, especially to its core - the arc heater system.Arc heater system consists of high-power rating power supply system, plasma arc and arc heater equipment. As a non-liner load, plasma arc presents a very complicated characteristic which makes it difficult to control the arc. Therefore, high request is proposed to the high-power rating power supply system. Meanwhile, as a high-power and high-voltage equipment, the hardware realization of arc heater costs much. Any design modification of the design may increase its cost. To solve these problems, models of arc heater system are established in MATLAB for simulation. Firstly, an improved plasma arc model, which is formulated from the famous Mayr and Cassie models is proposed and realized by compiling S-Function. The considerable degree of agreement between the simulated and experimental results shows the accuracy of this model. Secondly, models of 18/24/36-pulse thyristor rectifiers with three different rectifier units are proposed and established in MATLAB. Characteristics of each rectifier are discussed through simulations. Finally, arc model and power supply models are matched to simulate the real arc heater system. Based on the simulation results of the models mentioned above, the establishment of real arc heater can be optimized. Furthermore, the arc heater system, as a non-liner load of the grid, generates lots of harmonic disturbance. An effective method to solve this problem is to analyze the harmonic spectrum. The common way to analyze the harmonic spectrum is to introduce the Fourier Transform arithmetic. However, owing to the special topology of power supply system mentioned in this paper, the Fourier Transform is difficult to use for calculation. This paper uses a new way to analyze the harmonic spectrum on the base of P.P.Bringer method. The comparison of the calculation results and simulation results demonstrates the validity of the approach.