Potassium emission absorption system. Topical report 12

The Potassium Emission Absorption System is one of the advanced optical diagnostics developed at Mississippi State University to provide support for the demonstration of prototype-scale coal-fired combustion magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) electrical power generation. Intended for application in the upstream of an MHD flow, the system directly measures gas temperature and neutral potassium atom number density through spectroscopic emission absorption techniques. From these measurements the electron density can be inferred from a statistical equilibrium calculation and the electron conductivity in the MHD channel found by use of an electron mobility model. The instrument has been utilized for field test measurements on MHD facilities for almost a decade and has been proven to provide useful measurements as designed for MHD nozzle, channel, and diffuser test sections. The theory of the measurements, a system description, its capabilities, and field test measurement results are reported here. During the development and application of the instrument several technical issues arose which when addressed advanced the state of the art in emission absorption measurement. Studies of these issues are also reported here and include: two-wavelength measurements for particle-laden flows, potassium D-line far wing absorption coefficient, bias in emission absorption measurements arising from dirty windows and misalignments, non-coincident multiwavelength emission absorption sampling errors, and lineshape fitting for boundary layer flow profile information. Although developed for NLHD application, the instrument could be applied to any high temperature flow with a resonance line in the 300 to 800 nm range, for instance other types of flames, rocket plumes or low temperature plasmas