Atmospheric pressure plasmas are used in applications across a wide range of areas in science and engineering including flow and combustion control, biomedicine, materials processing, nanotechnology, and environmental engineering. In recent years, nanosecond repetitively pulsed (NRP) discharges have attracted great interest due to their extremely efficient generation of excited, radical, and ionized species at atmospheric pressure. It is critical to understand the chemical species production and temperature evolution in these plasmas for advancement of plasma-based technologies. Such knowledge would permit the development of highly tailored plasma sources that can produce plasmas with spatio-temporal and thermochemical characteristics that are customized to a variety of applications with broad societal impact. This presentation will provide an overview of current research efforts at Purdue University on development and characterization of plasma actuators based on NRP discharges for use as flow and combustion control devices. Development of time-resolved plasma measurement techniques using streak-spectroscopy and ultrafast lasers will be presented. Efforts to characterize the local flow field induced by the rapid plasma heating using optical diagnostics will also be discussed. Finally, ongoing work to employ these NRP plasmas for control of high-speed flows and combustion will be presented.

About The Speaker...
Sally Bane is an Assistant Professor in the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Purdue University. She received her B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Virginia and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Aeronautics from the California Institute of Technology. Dr. Bane’s research interests lie in two primary areas: plasmas for aerospace applications and combustion dynamics. Her research group conducts a broad range of research on pulsed nonequilibrium plasmas, including efforts on ultra-fast plasma measurements and optical diagnostics, plasmas for high-speed flow control, and plasma-assisted ignition and combustion. In 2016, Dr. Bane received an AFOSR Young Investigator award to investigate plasma-assisted combustion at high pressures. Dr. Bane also conducts fundamental research on flame and detonation dynamics at Purdue’s Zucrow Laboratories. She is one of the founding members of the Cold Plasmas Preeminent Team in the College of Engineering at Purdue, and is an active member of the AIAA Plasmadynamics and Lasers Technical Committee.