Grove School mechanical engineer Yang Liu leads a U.S. Dept. of Energy-supported project to develop critical processes in plasma-based research.
Funded by a $799,352 U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) Office of Science grant, research is underway at The City College of New York to fundamentally advance understanding of the critical processes in plasma-based anti-/de-icing approaches and plasma-assisted additive manufacturing and coating technologies. The three-year project is led by Yang Liu, assistant professor in the Grove School of Engineering and an expert in experimental fluid mechanics.
According to Liu, plasma-droplet interactions have been recognized as the fundamental mechanisms of many industrial and natural processes, including propulsion, material processing, health care, nanomaterial synthesis, water treatment, and lightning.
“These processes usually involve multiscale multi-physics such as evaporation, heat and mass transfer, charge transfer, interfacial instabilities, and chemical activations. Many molecular-scale reactions and transport processes of short-lived species occur in these mechanisms, for example, transport of O-H radicals from gas-phase plasma to liquid-phase droplet, contributing to the complexity of plasma-droplet interactions in different regimes,” he said.
In recent years, along with the new advancement of plasma-based anti-/de-icing technologies and additive manufacturing (AM) and coating technologies, the micro-scale interactions between plasma discharge and supercooled droplets have gained significant attention due to their fundamental roles in determining the macro-scale multiphase phenomena in these processes. While many efforts have been made to reveal the fundamental physical and chemical processes in plasma-droplet interactions, they are limited in the transport and reaction behaviors between gas-phase plasma and thermally stable liquid-phase droplets.
However, Liu noted the lack of knowledge about the fundamental multi-state multiphase transport behaviors and thermal energy transfer during the complex interactions between plasma discharge and metastable supercooled droplets. “This poses a serious technical challenge and limits the further development of more efficient tools/systems in a wide range of engineering applications, including but not limited to anti-/de-icing technologies and additive manufacturing and coating processes,” he explained.
The overarching goal of the project is to discover new fundamentals of the very complex multi-state inter-phase transport processes and thermal energy transfer during the mutual interactions between plasma discharge and supercooled droplets in two representative regimes. These are: in-flight supercooled droplet traveling through diffuse plasma discharge; and supercooled droplet impinging on surfaces modulated with dielectric barrier plasma discharge.
The project is entitled “Fundamental study of the dynamic and thermal behaviors of supercooled droplet interacting with plasma discharge.”
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Jay Mwamba
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