Plasma perks: Bernard Parent wins $650K to investigate fuel-efficient ignition

Plasma-assisted combustion promises greater efficiency and transformative possibilities for propulsion and power generation systems, but the mystery surrounding its fundamental physics stunts technology from reaching its potential.

Bernard Parent, an associate professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering, has won a three-year, $650,000 research grant from the National Science Foundation to study how plasma interacts with material surfaces. His findings will clarify how plasma behaves in propulsion applications. 

“What Parent is doing is different from anything I’ve experienced before,” said AME graduate student Colby Cinqmars, who will be assisting Parent in performing computer simulations. “I’m excited to be diving into something completely new.”

Ohio State University’s Igor Adamovich, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, is collaborating on the research. 

An economic solution for gas consumption

Plasma is a fourth state of matter (along with solid, liquid and gas) containing a large proportion of charged particles. It is ubiquitous in the universe, and less common on Earth – naturally occurring plasmas on Earth include lightning and other atmospheric phenomena. Plasma can be created, typically by applying high energy to a gas, and is found in everyday applications like neon lights and plasma television displays. 

Using plasma in combustion applications can improve engine performance across a broad range of industries: fuel efficiency in automobiles; reduction of nitrous oxide emissions and enabling biogas burning in industrial power generation; restarting turbojet engines and anchoring flames in hypersonic flight – vehicles that move five times the speed of sound. 

“In a nutshell, it makes the reaction faster and uses less fuel in relation to the oxygen involved,” said Parent. “It will allow for what is called lean combustion, where you can sustain a flame in lower fuel conditions.” 

Parent will assess the molecular dynamics at play in plasma-assisted reactions, a critical knowledge gap. 

“When you ionize a gas to create a plasma, it creates a plasma sheath near the electrode surface. An electrical current does not travel through this region easily,” he said. “We don’t know, for instance, how many electrons get released from a surface when a molecule or an ion hits it, which is very important because it determines the resistance of the plasma sheath.” 

Using computer simulations and experiments, Parent will create more accurate predictive models for plasma-based reactions and provide designers with crucial information on plasma interactions for a variety of advanced combustion and propulsion chambers.