Conditions of burning of an arc with a recoverable carbon cathode

A system of equations of integral balances are solved simultaneously with a heat problem in order to determine the parameters of the cathode region of an arc with a recoverable carbon cathode formed from a plasma-generating medium. The solution corresponding to the conditions of recovery is identified in the set of solutions of this system of equations, obtained by varying the input parameters. It is demonstrated that only one solution out of this set corresponds to the mode of carbon cathode recovery, which is indicative of the sensitivity of the recivery mode to the arc parameters in actual practice.