Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The project deals with fundamental investigation and numerical simulation of electric corona, dielectric barrier and sliding discharges. While the full mathematical model of both phenomena is rather complicated and practically impossible for numerical handling, a reasonable simplification needs to be created, which involves the most important reactions only. Numerical algorithm for simulating discharge problems involves two parts: calculation of electric field and transport of all ionic species. This is governed by hyperbolic equations, which cannot be solved using conventional techniques. It is planned that the Total Variation Diminishing schemes can be effective to predict spatial and temporal distributions of ionic species, but in the version which can work for unstructured triangular meshes. The developed algorithm will be first used to study the fundamental properties of corona discharge in oxygen under negative and positive polarities of corona electrode for the case including photoionization. Then, some other gases will be investigated, most importantly nitrogen, which is not an electronegative gas, but there is an experimental evidence that Trichel pulses can also exist in this gas. Due to widespread interest in application dielectric barrier discharge, a numerical algorithm for this phenomenon will be also developed. Two approaches will be attempted: a glow and a pulse models. First one is simplified as it is based on a single ionic species approach, which completely neglects the processes in the ionization layer. However, it should be fast for any electrode configurations. The pulse model will try to reproduce individual current pulses, which is much more accurate, but the algorithm must be optimized, so that the entire process can be simulated in a reasonable time. Working and validated numerical algorithms will be used for modeling and optimization of two practical devices: electrostatic precipitator for collecting submicrometer particles using dielectric barrier discharge and electrostatic actuator for controlling the aerodynamic boundary layer. Both topics are experimentally investigated by a few research teams, but there is an urgent need to create a numerical model, so that the research progress can be substantially accelerated.