NUMERICAL-SIMULATION OF A 2 KA CONVECTION-STABILIZED NITROGEN ARC USING CFD TOOLS

A physical model for the computation of convection-stabilized circuit- breaker arcs is presented. The compressible Euler equations have been used as the basic flow model and have been coupled with a two-dimensio nal are model to account for the ohmic heating and radiation transport . The governing equations are discretized following a control-volume m ethod for unstructured triangular grids and the fluxes are evaluated u sing Roe's approximate Riemann solver. This computational fluid-dynami cs model is used for the numerical investigation of an axially blown n itrogen are in a supersonic nozzle and the results are compared with p revious numerical results and experimental data.