New conceptual design method of non-equilibrium disk MHD generator

It is important to develop a conceptual design method of a high performance non-equilibrium disk MHD generator. The objective of the conceptual design is to determine the basic specifications of the generator which satisfies many restrictions, in case some fixed conditions are given. The plasma in the designed generator should be stable and the isentropic efficiency should be as high as possible. One conceptual design method has already been propose. In this conventional design method, at first, the electron temperature distribution in the generator is fixed and next, many design calculations are performed for various inlet conditions to find a generator which has high performance and satisfies all restrictions. The above procedure, however, takes much trouble because a trial and error process is contained in it. Considering the above facts, in this paper, the authors propose a new conceptual design method of a non-equilibrium disk MHD generator. The method contains no trial and error process and can design a generator with a stable plasma and high isentropic efficiency. The procedure of the proposed method is explained and then generators with 100 and 20 MW thermal input are conceptually designed to confirm the usefulness of the proposed method.