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

近年来，人们已经做出了巨大的努力来制造可以与其他微型设备集成的小型等离子体源，以形成更复杂的微系统。因此，了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的一种新的运行方式。该提案将说明实现微等离子体在航空航天领域开启的新科学和工程的目标的理由和方法，即小型航天器的等离子体推进和主动流量控制。该项目将通过计算机模拟对所有流动参数(中性气体和带电物种)进行详细了解，并研究流动控制和航天器推进系统的微型化。一个自洽的耦合模型形式主义将为等离子体和流体之间的影响提供定性和定量的评估。有趣的是，高保真的模拟结果有可能提供关于等离子体流和气体之间其他复杂相互作用的局部但关键的参数(由于规模小，很难通过实验获得)：涉及动量和能量传递以及复杂的交叉相关效应。

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.