Design, Development, and Test of a Prototype Self-Excited MHD Generator

The period covered by this report has been devoted to fabrication, assembly and test of the various generator components and their auxiliary systems. Minor alterations were made of the burner design due to problems which arose during the fabrication of the various burner components, mainly the injector assembly. During careful analysis of the cooling water system in the pilot burner, it came to our attention that the safety factor on burnout was too small. The problem was solved by lowering the enthalpy of the combustion gases by dilution with nitrogen. This resulted in a modification of the pilot burner control system. In addition, we have also made some modification of the main fuel system and oxygen system. This work is described in Section III. An instrumentation system has been designed to measure generator performance and to monitor the functioning of the control system.