SIMILARITY AND SCALING LAWS FOR TRANSIENT LOW-CURRENT ARCS IN A STRONGLY ACCELERATING GAS-FLOW

Similarity parameters and scaling laws are derived appropriate to an a re burning in a strongly accelerating gas flow. The flow is assumed to be laminar and transport of energy by radiation is neglected. The fre edom available in selecting the normalization scheme is used to reflec t observations from experiment and computer simulations of are behavio ur. The similarity theory developed relates arcs which share the same values of two similarity parameters in affinely related nozzles. The t heory is verified using numerical calculations of an are burning in th e supersonic nozzle of a gas-blast circuit-breaker.