Study of spatial distributions of highly ionized nonequilibrium helium plasma at atmospheric pressures

Experimental study of helium plasma in the state of quasistationary heating under atmospheric pressure was made. The plasma state is shown to fail to be described by Saha- Boltzmann approximation at high ionization levels αi = 0.5-0.9, temperatures 2.5-4.0 eV and electron concentrations about 1017 cm-3. The deviation from the equilibrium state of the plasma is caused by lack of spatial uniformity due to charged particles loss by ambipolar diffusion. In order to thoroughly study the temporal changes of plasma radiation characteristics, spectroscopic analysis was carried out with DFS-452 spectrometer and high-speed CMOS camera Andor iStar attached to its output. The system yields the spatial resolution of 30-50 μm and temporal resolution of 5-50 μs. Electron concentration ne was measured from the half-width of the local Hei spectrum line contours having dominant quadruple Stark effect with well-known constants. In order to determine the temperature of heavy particles, Doppler component of HeI line triplet at 1083 nm was studied. The temporal evolution of the following important characteristics has been determined for helium plasma during pulsed heating: current power, intensities of a number of HeI and HeII spectral lines, electron temperatures and concentrations.