Plasma diagnostics using computed tomography method

Abstract

Summary form only given. A review of applications of the tomographic method for diagnostics of various plasma objects has been performed in this work. The objects are: methane plasma evolution in plasma-chemical reactor, a capillary discharge of inner diameter of 1 mm, a high-pressure non-symmetrical arc plasma, a high frequency inductive coupled plasma. The computed tomography is receiving increasing attention as a powerful method for the reconstruction of the local characteristics in both: high-temperature and low-temperature plasma. Local plasma characteristics can be derived from the integrated data by combining of an integrating measurement techniques and computer tomography algorithms and methods. This can provide much useful information on the plasma structure and its evolution in time. There are various theoretical approaches on the development of algorithms for obtaining tomographic images, such as algebraic reconstruction technique, maximum entropy method, minimum Fisher information algorithm, constrained optimization and maximum a posteriori methods. These algorithms are intended to be applied in different class of reconstruction problems corresponding to different kinds of prior and different kinds of data. A comparative analysis of these algorithms has been performed.