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Plasmas & Fluid Mechanics

The Ayyaswamy Lab focuses on fundamental and applied research to understand the physics of low temperature plasmas and non-continuum fluid mechanics.
The group's emphasis is on atmospheric pressure microplasmas and uses a combination of computational, theoretical and experimental methods to study various aspects of these systems.
Some of the current activities in the group include:
  • Microscale gas breakdown
  • Operating modes in field emission assisted microplasmas
  • Wave-microplasma interaction
  • PlasmaFoam module
  • Rarefied gas dynamics

Microscale Gas Breakdown

Breakdown

Field Emission Assisted Microplasmas

Microsplasmas

Wave-Microplasma Interaction

Interaction

plasmaFoam Code Development

  • The group uses one-dimensional in-house kinetic and fluid codes to develop a fundamental understanding of the physics of microplasmas.

  • However, in order to extend the studies to higher dimensions, the group devotes attention to implementing a plasma solver in the OpenFOAM framework popular in Computational Fluid Dynamics.

  • In a nutshell, plasmaFoam will solve the conservation equations (electron and ion continuity, momentum and energy) in a segregated fashion using second-order finite volume schemes that are standard in OpenFOAM.

 

This research is being led by the Ayyaswamy Lab (PI: Dr. Venkattraman Ayyaswamy)