The Project

Predictability in plasma science and engineering based on fundamental modelling has been considered a requirement for progress in the field, and model-based design for plasma processes has been identified as a necessary capability to achieve industrial goals, meaning that there is general agreement on the intellectual and technological importance of modelling low-temperature plasmas (LTPs).

Substantial progresses were made in setting the basic model formulations and computational techniques describing LTPs. However, maintaining this route requires a community-wide change in its mode of operation, by borrowing best practices from other disciplines (e.g. keeping a close linking between theory and computation, implementing verification & validation (V&V) standards, distributing open-source codes, and supporting open-access databases).

In recent years, plasma-based environmental and biological applications (EBA) have attracted the interest of pure and applied research, considering the flexibility and reactivity of plasma medium. Many of these studies have focused on R-N2-O2 plasmas (R being a rare gas, Ar or He), but still the wide sort of working conditions envisaged for EBA introduce new challenges while pursuing high-level quantitative predictions for the behaviour of these systems.

The project aims developing a KInetic Testbed for PLASMa Environmental and Biological Applications (KITPLASMEBA), embodying a web-platform (KIT) with state-of-the-art kinetic schemes, and a MATLAB® kinetic code (LisbOn KInetics, LoKI) with a modular structure, embedding a Boltzmann solver (to become open-source) and a chemistry solver for the different gases/gas-mixtures considered here. LoKI provides the combined chemical and transport description of plasma charged / neutral species, both in volume and surface phases, for user-defined mixture compositions, pressure, radial dimension and excitation conditions.

The project is structured into the following topics / tasks
- Web-access platform construction and maintenance
- Documentation
- Boltzmann solver development
- Description of charged-particle transport
- Multi-species description of neutral transport
- Thermal model for the gas/plasma system
- KIT for rare gases (R=He/Ar)
- KIT for R-N2
- KIT for R-O2
- KIT for R-N2-O2
- Validation tests