Characteristics of Single Cathode Cascaded Bias Voltage Arc Plasma

A single cathode with a cascaded bias voltage arc plasma source has been developed with a new quartz cathode chamber,instead of the previous copper chambers,to provide better diagnostic observation and access to the plasma optical emission.The cathode chamber cooling scheme is also modified to be naturally cooled only by light emission without cooling water to improve the optical thin performance in the optical path.A single-parameter physical model has been developed to describe the power dissipated in the cascaded bias voltage arc discharge argon plasmas,which have been investigated by utilizing optical emission spectroscopy（OES） and Langmuir probe.In the experiments,discharge currents from 50 A to 100 A,argon flow rates from 800 sccm to 2000 sccm and magnetic fields of 0.1 T and 0.2 T were chosen.The results show：（a） the relationship between the averaged resistivity and the averaged current density exhibits an empirical scaling law as η∝ j^（-0.63369） and the power dissipated in the arc has a strong relation with the filling factor;（b） through the quartz,the argon ions optical emission lines have been easily observed and are dominating with wavelengths between 340 nm and 520 nm,which are the emissions of Ar^＋-434.81 nm and Ar^＋-442.60 nm line,and theintensities are increasing with the arc current and decreasing with the inlet argon flow rate;and（c） the electron density and temperature can reach 2.0 × 10^19 m^-3 and 0.48 eV,respectively,under the conditions of an arc current of 90 A and a magnetic field of 0.2 T.The half-width of the ne radial profile is approximatively equal to a few Larmor radii of electrons and can be regarded as the diameter of the plasma jet in the experiments.

Performance of Sewage Sludge Treatment and Electricity Generation by Different Configuration Microbial Fuel Cells

This paper compared the degradation efficiency of sludge organic matters and electric-production by two typical microbial fuel cells——dual-chamber microbial fuel cell(DMFC)and single chamber air cathode microbial fuel cell(SAMFC),and the variations of sludge protein,polysaccharide and ammonia nitrogen within the systems were also investigated.The results showed that the concentration of sludge soluble chemical oxygen demand,protein and carbohydrate of DMFC are higher than these of SAMFC during the systems operation,while DMFC can achieve a better ammonia nitrogen removal than SAMFC.Under the same operation condition,the stable voltage output of DMFC and SAMFC is 0.61 V and 0.37 V;the maximum power density of DMFC and SAMFC is 2.79 W/m3and 1.25 W/m3;TCOD removal efficiency of DMFC and SAMFC is 34.14%and 28.63%for 12 d,respectively.Meanwhile,DMFC has a higher coulomb efficiency than SAMFC,but both are less than5%.The results showed that DMFC present a better performance on sludge degradation and electric-production.