Asymmetrical Abel Inversion of MHD Generator Discharges

The method of Yasutomo et al. for asymmetrical Abel inversion is extended. The original solution consists of a radial part and a weight function, describing the degree of asymmetry. In this work, the radial part is generalized to an elliptical part by employing a coordinate transformation. A factor ¿ is introduced defining the ellipticity. The extended method is applied to continuum intensity measurements of a discharge in the argon-cesium plasma of a shock-tunnel MHD generator. Two axes of observation have been used, the first one to obtain the radial part and the weight function, the second one, at an angle of 30° with the first axis, to obtain the value of ¿ needed in the transformation. The reconstructed spatial distribution of radiation intensity is nearly elliptical but with asymmetry in flow direction. The distribution is stretched out along the magetic field lines and fairly well reproduces the emitted intensity profiles.