Plasmas can enable very lean mixtures to burn and can stabilize combustion in extreme conditions.” “The mixture in an advanced engine will be so fuel-lean that it cannot be ignited or cannot be stabilized easily. “We push the engine to extreme conditions to improve efficiency and reliability,” said Ju, who directs Princeton’s Program in Sustainable Energy. The team's research aims to apply low-temperature plasmas to help engines conserve fuel and reduce emissions. “Using plasmas to enhance combustion and catalysis will require a lot more fundamental information to be able to exert some control over the situation,” Koel said.
But how plasmas modulate such reactions is not well understood and will be a focus of the new research. They can also help catalysts speed up reactions for fuel oxidation and other useful chemical products, the researchers said. Low-temperature plasmas can create new reaction pathways for combustion that could increase engine efficiency. There are two general forms of plasma: high-temperature plasmas that are found in stars and in fusion reactors and low-temperature versions (ranging from 100 to 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit) used in fluorescent lighting, electrical propulsion and semiconductor manufacturing. Plasma, the fourth state of matter (beyond the conventional solids, liquids and gases), is an ionized gas consisting of approximately equal numbers of positively and negatively charged particles.
The principal investigator is Igor Adamovich of Ohio State University. Yiguang Ju, the Robert Porter Patterson Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and Bruce Koel, a professor of chemical and biological engineering, are co-principal investigators of the new research center. With the broader goal of improving energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies, the team will use experimental and modeling approaches to gain fundamental understanding of plasma-aided combustion and plasma-assisted catalysis.
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