Experimental design of a penlike plasma torch with a parametric fea to improve effective treating area

Abstract

This research entitled Experimental design of a pen-like plasma torch with a parametric FEA to improve effective treating area describes a new concept of the non-thermal pen-like plasma torch. Plasma is used for a variety of industrial applications like surface modification, surface activation, and surface treatment for coating technology and many more but a pen-like plasma torch is a need of industry. The pen-like plasma torch is constructed here of 0.25 kW capacity using method of design thinking and parametric FEA for component design being simple and effective in application. This research and development was required because available device is not useful for practical applications due to limited effective surface treating area. In this context, this research investigates surface modification property of newly designed pen-like plasma torch. In contrast to such status, the design of the novel device i.e. pen-like plasma torch, reporting efficient performs in terms of surface modification of area is presented. To achieve this, design parameters like anode-cathode material, gas flow pattern, and supply power is changed. The new design of pen-like plasma torch has DC power as novelty to generate non-thermal plasma while most of non-thermal plasma torch uses high-frequency AC power or radio frequency power. To validate the design, experiments are carried out on designed pen-like plasma torch for investigating the behaviour of the generated plasma for the surface modification on copper material. After plasma treatment, it is found that the lubrication fluid retaining ability of the copper material is improved significantly. The hardness of the copper material is increased from 49 Vickers to 75 Vickers due to hardening of surface reaction due to plasma treatment. This work documents the surface modification characteristics of plasma generation by pen-like plasma torch for copper material with improved effective surface treated area from 10 mm to 25 mm in terms of diameter. The author also reports a regression eq