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

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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.