The forthcoming analyseswere based upon the injection of a continuous
water jet into an Ar/H2 plasma plume. The operating conditions
and an explanation of these choices can be found in [8,9] and are not detailed
here. As shown in Fig. 2, the continuous liquid jet was completely
disintegrated into droplets 3 mmdownstream of the torch exit. The asfragmented
droplets were immersed in a plasma atmosphere at a high
temperature, around 10,000 K, while the surrounding gas flowed at
more than 500 m.s−1. The PDF (probability density function) distribution
of the droplet revealed an average diameter of 20 μmfor thedroplet
population prior to the evaporation. Due to the inertia of the continuous
liquid shape, at the initialmoment when fragmentation started, the asfragmented
droplets had no velocity. They were accelerated quickly by
the plasma drag force.