An analysis is made of the boundary layer effect on the electrical characteristics of a Faraday MHD generator. An electrical substitution circuit and a method for calculating its elements are proposed. An analysis is made of the local circuit for the substitution of a channel in a gas-dynamic approximation. It is noted that the questions of the flow of current through a turbulent boundary layer require careful examination. It has been shown that the existing methods for the calculation of real resistance of a boundary layer, which are based on a break in integration on a certain arbitrary boundary from the electrode, give results which are strongly dependent on the selection of this boundary.

The paper deals with the results of research on the electrical characteristics of an MHD generator, carried out in a model power plant using the U-02 MHD generator. In this device was tested different types of MHD ducts which vary both in design and in the structural materials used for the electrodes and the insulating walls. As a result of this work the power of the generator was raised to 42 kW and the operating time was taken to 100 hours. The maximum power extracted from a single pair of electrodes has reached 2.5 kW and the current density at the electrodes is 2.5 A/sq cm (in the short-circuiting regime). A great deal of experimental data was accumulated during the development and testing of the duct designs, and the paper is devoted to an analysis of this information. The object of study is a Faraday-type MHD generator with segmented electrodes, operating in a subsonic gas-dynamic regime. (Author).

The investigations included in this research are as follows: Experiments on turbulent Hartmann flow in plasmas; Turbulence suppression in magnetohydrodynamic flows; Nonuniform electrical conduction in magnetohydrodynamic channels; Electrostatic probe theory and application in a high-temperature, collision-dominated, potassium-seeded argon plasma; Electron transport coefficients for two-temperature plasmas; Necessary conditions for the validity of the two-temperature plasma model; Experimental electrode current distributions in MHD channels; The influence of boundary layers on spectroscopic temperature measurements in MHD channels; Discharge characteristics in a seeded plasma flow. (Author).