Resource scarcity will lead to a further increase in prices in the future, pushing forward the development of thermal spray technologies as one of the key technologies of the 21st century. For a fast and efficient development of new innovative coatings a deeper knowledge of the whole thermal spray processing is required. The material to form the coating is mostly injected as powder particles into the hot gas flow where those particles are heated and accelerated. Parameters such as gas temperature and velocity at the injection location are very relevant for the resulting quality of the deposited coatings. This work describes a new contactless and non-disturbing diagnostics based on the Doppler effect which is capable to measure the gas drift velocity in fast gas flows, cold as well as hot. To evaluate the wavelength shift at free electrons (Thomson scattering) and bound electrons (Rayleigh scattering), produced by the drift velocity of such electrons, a high spectral resolution of the scattered spectrum is needed.\r\nFor this purpose a Fizeau Interferometer (FI) with high spectral resolution has been developed. In contrast to state-of-the-art Fabry-Perot Interferometers (FPI) this FI consists of two slightly misaligned semitransparent optical plates. Due to this latter modification the detailed monitoring of the plate parallelism, essential for FPI’s, is no longer necessary. Moreover the relative small reflection coefficient of the used optical plates (R=0.8) yields higher intensities at the detector. Two symmetrically arranged but reverse orientated laser beams ensure the experimental measurement of relative wavelength shifts even smaller than the resolution of the FI. Such spectral resolution can be adjusted and applied to both cold as well as hot gas flows. In a first stage, and in order to verify the experiment, a supersonic nozzle of known Mach number has been designed and measured by means of Particle Imaging Velocimetry (PIV) as well as by using the diagnostics developed in this work. A high correlation between both techniques has been achieved for different geometrical arrangements of the FI. However the system’s high sensitivity leads to a non negligible influence of diffuse scattered and reflected light (“false light”), particularly for those low scattering intensities expected at hot and thin gas flows. This influence nevertheless can be estimated and substracted from the experimental interferometric results using a model developed in this work. Regarding hot plasma jets, Rayleigh as well as Thomson scattering has to be considered. Both effects are incorporated by means of a theoretical model which calculates the densities of atoms, ions and free electrons at the outlet of the plasma generator, using as input the effective electric power and the mass flow of the gas injected into the plasma generator. Additionally this model permits an estimation of the gas and electron temperatures.\r\nThe interpretation of the measured velocities correlates well with theoretical estimations of the flow velocity as well as drift velocities estimated by the time delay in the fluctuation pattern of the plasma gas jet.\r\n
«Resource scarcity will lead to a further increase in prices in the future, pushing forward the development of thermal spray technologies as one of the key technologies of the 21st century. For a fast and efficient development of new innovative coatings a deeper knowledge of the whole thermal spray processing is required. The material to form the coating is mostly injected as powder particles into the hot gas flow where those particles are heated and accelerated. Parameters such as gas temperatur...
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