A team from Princeton University and Ohio State University has been awarded a five-year, $3-million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to advance research on low-temperature plasmas.
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.
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. The principal investigator is Igor Adamovich of Ohio State University.
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. 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.
Read more at Princeton Engineering
Photo: Princeton professors Yiguang Ju and Bruce Koel are co-principal investigators of a new research center on low-temperature plasmas. Photo by David Kelly Crow