• Journal of the Korean Vacuum Society
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.189-194
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• 2008

Measurements with a Langmuir probe, which are the most often used procedures of plasma diagnostics, can disturb plasma flows and change its characteristics quite a little because the probe should be inserted into thermal flowing plasmas. In this study, we calculated the characteristics of thermal plasmas with and without the probe into an atmospheric argon free-burning arc numerically, and investigated aerodynamic and thermal disturbances with temperature and axial velocity distributions. For the modelling of thermal plasmas, we have made two governing equations, which are on the thermal-flow and electromagnetic fields, coupled together with a commercial CFD package and user-coded subroutines. It was found that thermal disturbances happened to both sides of the probe, before and behind, seriously. Due to the aerodynamic disturbance, we could find that there were the stagnation point in front of the probe and the wake behind it. Therefore, aerodynamic and thermal disturbances caused by the probe insertion should be considered to increase the reliability of the probe diagnostics.