Preliminary Experimental Investigation on MHD Power Generation Using Seeded Supersonic Argon Flow as Working Fluid

This paper presents a preliminary experimental investigation on magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) power generation using seeded supersonic argon flow as working fluid. Helium and argon are used as driver and driven gas respectively in a shock tunnel. Equilibrium contact surface operating mode is used to obtain high temperature gas, and the conductivity is obtained by adding seed K2CO3 powder into the driven section. Under the conditions of nozzle inlet total pressure being 0.32 MPa, total temperature 6 504 K, magnetic field density about 0.5 T and nozzle outlet velocity 1 959 m/s, induction voltage and short-circuit current of the segmentation MHD power generation channel are measured, and the experimental results agree with theoretical calculations; the average conductivity is about 20 S/m calculated from characteristics of voltage and current. When load factor is 0.5, the maximum power density of the MHD power generation channel reaches 4.797 1 MW/m3, and the maximum enthalpy extraction rate is 0.34%. Finally, the principle and method of indirect testing for gas state parameters are derived and analyzed.