When
Thursday, November 21, 2024 - 4:00 p.m.
Carmen Guerra-Garcia
Charles Stark Draper Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
"Electrical Discharges in Reactive and Flowing Gases"
AME Lecture Hall, Room S212
Zoom link
Abstract: When investigating electrical discharges for aerospace applications, real-world conditions often deviate from textbook ideals, featuring nonuniform environments with reactive and flowing gases. This presentation highlights two examples of such scenarios and their implications. The first case examines the application of plasma technologies to enhance and control challenging combustion regimes, emphasizing the overlooked backward problem - how combustion influences electrical breakdown and discharge dynamics. Using nanosecond pulsed discharges at kHz frequencies to mitigate flame instabilities in lean mixtures reveals critical pulse-to-pulse variations that can impact the actuation authority of the discharge. The second case looks at the interaction of lightning discharges with aircraft during flight. During the damaging current flow phase, the aircraft can travel ten times its length, and during this time, the arc dynamically interacts with the fluid boundary layer and undergoes reattachment to new locations - a phenomenon known as the swept stroke phase. Understanding the coupled dynamics of the flow physics and the electrical breakdown can inform the design of future lightning protection schemes.
Bio: Carmen Guerra-Garcia is an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she leads the Aerospace Plasma Group, focused on the intersection of aerospace engineering, low temperature plasma technologies, and gas discharge physics. The group's current efforts span from aircraft safety issues (interaction of lightning with aircraft, novel methods for protection and mitigation against lightning strike damage), to plasma technologies for ignition, combustion, and chemical conversion, and combine multi-physics modeling, computation, and experimentation. Prior to joining the MIT faculty, Guerra-Garcia worked as a research engineer in Boeing Research and Technology Europe and was a visiting researcher at Princeton University. She earned her BS in aeronautical engineering from the Polytechnic University of Madrid, and her SM and PhD degrees in aeronautics and astronautics from MIT. Guerra-Garcia is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award (2024) and the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award (2021), and her teaching and mentoring have been recognized by the Junior Bose Award for Excellence in Teaching (2024) and the Earll M. Murman Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Advising (2021), respectively.