CFD Research technical fellow, Dr. Vladimir Kolobov, and scientists Dr. Dmitry Levko and Dr. Robert Arslanbekov have had their paper entitled “Multi-scale dynamics of atmospheric-pressure discharges ignited over liquid electrodes” featured on the cover of the January 2020 issue of the Journal of Applied Physics.
The paper selected as a feature article of the Journal is a result of the Phase II DOE SBIR project “Simulations of Explosive Electron Emission in Cathodic Arcs”. The software developed during this project enables simulations of plasma-surface interactions with adaptive Cartesian mesh. In the featured article, it is applied for studies of atmospheric-pressure gas discharges ignited over liquid electrodes. The computational model takes into account both the liquid electrode motion under the influence of the applied electric field and plasma generation by electron impact in the gas phase during the gas breakdown.
The work describes an important advancement in the field. It has been observed that when an electric current from gas plasma flows into a conducting liquid, remarkable chemical reactions occur in the liquid phase. This process is referred to as a glow-discharge electrolysis. It differs fundamentally from the conventional gas discharges since in the glow-discharge electrolysis, the liquid serves as one of the electrodes and the reactions of interest occur in the liquid phase. This new software enables simulations of plasma interfaces in such multi-phase systems.
The authors were able to show that the dynamics of multiphase plasmas containing gas, plasma, and liquid states, is characterized by three vastly different intrinsic time scales: the slow liquid motion time scale (usually, milliseconds), the fast electron time scale (nanoseconds), and an intermediate ion time scale (microseconds). This new work provides a modeling tool to enable researchers to better understand the physics associated with glow-discharge electrolysis for biomedical, agriculture and food processing applications.
Link to journal: https://aip.scitation.org/action/showLargeCover?doi=10.1063%2Fjap.2020.127.issue-4
Link to paper: https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5132319
