Erlangen 2026 – scientific programme
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P: Fachverband Plasmaphysik
P 12: Atmospheric Pressure Plasmas I
P 12.6: Talk
Wednesday, March 18, 2026, 15:15–15:30, KH 01.020
Peculiarities of the current transfer on a copper cathode microarcs in air in presence of metal vapour — •Margarita Baeva1, Jonas K. C. Ballentin2, and Dirk Uhrlandt1,2 — 1Leibniz Institute for Plasma Science and Technology (INP), Greifswald, Germany — 2Institute of Electrical Power Engineering, University of Rostock, Rostock, Germany
Analysis of the current transfer on the copper cathode is performed for a switching arc arrangement operated at DC of 2 A at atmospheric pressure in a mixture air/Cu. The analysis is based on a unified non-equilibrium model that provides in a self-consistent manner the spatial distribution of the plasma properties needed for this analysis accounts for the increase of the gap length during the contact opening.
The presence of metal vapour in the plasma even in the considered mole fraction of 0.002 leads to the dominance of the singly charged copper ion. Ionization process occurs both in the space-charge region of the cathode and beyond the edge to the quasineutral plasma bulk. The computed spatial distribution of the electric potential indicates a maximum in the vicinity of the cathode, which causes an ion flux toward the plasma bulk. The predicted ratio of the ion to total current density amounts to 0.41-0.76 as a result of the interplay of increasing cathode voltage drop and in turn increasing ion mobility and drift velocity that overrules the decrease of the ion number density.
The work is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) Project number 524731006.
Keywords: low-voltage; low-current; DC arc; current transfer; modelling