Characterizing micro-plasmas for aerospace applications: electric propulsion and active flow control

近年来，已经做出了显著的努力来制造可以与其他微器件集成以形成更复杂的微系统的小型等离子体源。因此，理解和控制小空间内的动态对基础研究和技术创新都至关重要。微尺度等离子体具有非常高的带电和激发粒子浓度，代表了低温等离子体运行的新机制。该提案将说明实现这些目标的基本原理和方法，这些目标将有助于微等离子体在航空航天领域开辟新的科学和工程，即小型航天器的等离子体推进和主动流动控制。该项目将通过计算机模拟详细了解所有流动参数（中性气体和带电物质），并研究流动控制和航天器推进系统的小型化。一个自洽的耦合建模形式主义将提供一个定性和定量的评价等离子体和流体之间的影响。有趣的是，高保真度的模拟结果有可能提供访问本地，但关键的参数（难以获得实验，由于小尺度）等离子体流和气体之间的其他复杂的相互作用：涉及动量和能量传递，也复杂的交叉相关的影响。

In recent years, significant efforts have been made to fabricate small plasma sources that can be integrated with other micro-devices to form more complex microsystems. Understanding and controlling the dynamics within small spaces will therefore be crucial to both fundamental research and technological innovations. Micro-scale plasmas with their very high concentration of charged and excited particles represent a new regime of operation for low-temperature plasmas. The proposal will describe the rationale and methods to achieve the goals that will contribute to new science and engineering opened by microplasmas in the aerospace field, namely plasma-based propulsion for small spacecraft and active flow control. The project will pursue the detailed understanding of all the flow parameters (both neutral gas and charged species) via computer simulations and investigate miniaturization of flow control and spacecraft propulsion systems. A self-consistent coupling modeling formalism will provide both a qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the effects between plasma and fluid. Interestingly, the high-fidelity simulation results have the potential of providing access to local but critical parameters (difficult to obtain experimentally due to the small scales) on other complex interactions between the plasma flow and gas: involving both momentum and energy transfers and also complex cross-related effects.