AVS 62nd International Symposium & Exhibition
    Plasma Science and Technology Friday Sessions
       Session PS+SE-FrM

Paper PS+SE-FrM6
Numerical Modelling of Atmospheric Pulsed Streamers over Water; Electrodynamics at the Interface

Friday, October 23, 2015, 10:00 am, Room 210A

Session: Atmospheric Pressure Plasma Processing II
Presenter: Alex Lindsay, North Carolina State University
Authors: A. Lindsay, North Carolina State University
S. Shannon, North Carolina State University
D.B. Graves, University of California at Berkeley
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There is significant interest in characterizing interactions between atmospheric plasmas and water for applications in medicine, water decontamination, distributed farming, etc. In one particular example members of the community are investigating replacement of invasive electroporation for drug delivery and gene therapy with low-power atmospheric plasma devices. Although the mechanism by which electric fields create conductive pathways for drug delivery into cells is generally known, the mechanism by which plasmas create those liquid-phase electric fields is an active area of research. Pioneering work in [1] has done much to advance our understanding, but more work remains. We wish to present modeling tools that are open to the community in the hope that this will enhance development of the tools, scrutiny and reproducibility of numerical results, and the pace at which plasma-liquid research is conducted. By developing open community tools, we hope to reduce the time-waste that comes from different groups re-inventing the wheel to study similar phenomena. With those motivations, we consider both finite-volume and finite-element discretizations of the Poisson and continuity equations governing electrodynamics in the gas and liquid phases. For a first pass, a local-field approximation is used to study streamer propagation in a point-to-plane configuration with water serving as the planar electrode. Different methods for stabilization (e.g. inconsistent vs. consistent, streamline and/or crosswind) as well as markers for mesh adaption (potential, electron density curvatures) are considered.

[1] Babaeva et. al. J. Phys. D: Appl. Phys. 47 (2014) 235201