INVESTIGATION OF THE PARAMETERS
OF A NONSTATIONARY ARC SPOT ON A COPPER
CATHODE BY THE THERMOSPECTROSCOPIC METHOD.
I. CURRENT DENSITY

D. A. Bublievskii,a, b A. Marotta,a
A. M. Esipchuk,a, b L. I. Sharakhovskii,b 
and E. V. A. Da Silvaa 

UDC 621.387.143.014.31

A new procedure of determination of the effective density of the current 
in a nonstationary arc spot with the use of thermophysical 
and spectroscopic measurements has been proposed and tested. The procedure 
is based on recording of the critical cathode temperature corresponding 
to the instant of sharp increase in the intensity of the  = 5218 Å CuI 
atomic spectral line, which coincides with the beginning of intense emission 
of a copper vapor from the spot, according the hypothesis proposed. New 
results are compared to those obtained earlier by purely thermophysical 
methods.

a Gleb Wataghin Institute of Physics 
at Campinas State University, Campinas, Brazil (Instituto de Fisica 
"Gleb Wataghin," Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Campinas, Sao Paulo, Brasil); 
email: aruy@ifi.unicamp.br; bA. V. Luikov Heat and Mass Transfer Institute, 
National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, 15 P. Brovka Str., Minsk, 
220072, Belarus; email: leonidsh@tut.by. Translated from Inzhenerno-Fizicheskii 
Zhurnal, Vol. 78, No. 1, pp. 159-166, January-February, 2005. 
Original article submitted February 10, 2003.