How can a laser-induced plasma affect fluid turbulence?
One of the many difficulties of achieving speeds significantly faster than that of sound is the interaction of structures with turbulent flow in the background. Inside an engine turbulence can mess up the flow field significantly. Shankar Ghosh, an AEM doctoral candidate, is analyzing ways to control turbulent flows using a laser-induced plasma.
Using a laser, scientists can superheat a small pocket of gas until it becomes a plasma, the fourth state of matter, the other states commonly known as solid, liquid and gas. A plasma has potential to control turbulent flows. Shankar says, but fundamental knowledge is lacking in this area. In an effort to understand the phenomenon better, Shankar, working under AEM Associate Professor Krishnan Mahesh, models a laser-induced plasma computationally.
Using computational fluid dynamics, Shankar looks to study the effect of a laser-induced plasma on turbulent flows.
“When you focus a laser beam in a small volume of a gas, a part of the laser energy is absorbed by molecules in the focal volume resulting in the gas undergoing a number of different physical processes like dissociation, ionization and recombination”, Shankar explains, “ Higher the temperatures, more is the physics involved and so more fun it is to model all the physics. However on the flip side, the simulations become more expensive computationally with increase in temperature.”
Although the research is fundamental and the project is at a fairly early stage, Ghosh stresses, “Understanding gained through numerical simulations has potential implications in aerospace and other related fields”.
Last Modified: 2008-02-21 at 16:15:10 -- this is in International Standard Date and Time Notation