The Nonequilibrium Gas and Plasma Dynamics Laboratory (NGPDL) at the

Aerospace Engineering Aerospace engineering is the primary field of engineering concerned with the development of aircraft and spacecraft. It has two major and overlapping branches: aeronautical engineering and astronautical engineering. Avionics engineering is si ...

Department of the

University of Colorado Boulder The University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder, CU, or Colorado) is a public research university in Boulder, Colorado. Founded in 1876, five months before Colorado became a state, it is the flagship university of the University of Colorado syst ...

is headed by Professor Iain D. Boyd and performs research of

nonequilibrium Non-equilibrium thermodynamics is a branch of thermodynamics that deals with physical systems that are not in thermodynamic equilibrium but can be described in terms of macroscopic quantities (non-equilibrium state variables) that represent an ext ...

gases and plasmas involving the development of physical models for various gas systems of interest, numerical algorithms on the latest supercomputers, and the application of challenging flows for several exciting projects. The lab places a great deal of emphasis on comparison of simulation with external experimental and theoretical results, having ongoing collaborative studies with colleagues at the

, other universities, and government laboratories such as

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research. NASA was established in 1958, succeeding t ...

, United States Air Force Research Laboratory, and the

United States Department of Defense The United States Department of Defense (DoD, USDOD or DOD) is an executive branch department of the federal government charged with coordinating and supervising all agencies and functions of the government directly related to national secu ...

. Current research areas of the NGPDL include

electric propulsion Spacecraft electric propulsion (or just electric propulsion) is a type of spacecraft propulsion technique that uses electrostatic or electromagnetic fields to accelerate mass to high speed and thus generate thrust to modify the velocity of a sp ...

hypersonic In aerodynamics, a hypersonic speed is one that exceeds 5 times the speed of sound, often stated as starting at speeds of Mach 5 and above. The precise Mach number at which a craft can be said to be flying at hypersonic speed varies, since in ...

aerothermodynamics, flows involving very small length scales (

MEMS Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), also written as micro-electro-mechanical systems (or microelectronic and microelectromechanical systems) and the related micromechatronics and microsystems constitute the technology of microscopic devices, ...

devices), and materials processing (jets used in deposition thin films for advanced materials). Due to nonequilibrium effects, these flows cannot always be computed accurately with the macroscopic equations of

gas dynamics Compressible flow (or gas dynamics) is the branch of fluid mechanics that deals with flows having significant changes in fluid density. While all flows are compressible, flows are usually treated as being incompressible when the Mach number (the r ...

and

plasma physics Plasma ()πλάσμα
, Henry George Liddell, R ...

. Instead, the lab has adopted a microscopic approach in which the atoms/molecules in a gas and the ions/electrons in a plasma are simulated on computationally using a large number of model particles within sophisticated

Monte Carlo methods Monte Carlo methods, or Monte Carlo experiments, are a broad class of computational algorithms that rely on repeated random sampling to obtain numerical results. The underlying concept is to use randomness to solve problems that might be determini ...

. The lab has developed a general 2D/axi-symmetric/3D code, MONACO, for simulating nonequilibrium neutral flows that can run either on scalar workstations or in a

parallel computing Parallel computing is a type of computation in which many calculations or processes are carried out simultaneously. Large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which can then be solved at the same time. There are several different fo ...

environment. The lab also has developed a general 2D/axi-symmetric/3D code, LeMANS, to numerically solve the Navier-Stokes equations using

computational fluid dynamics Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is a branch of fluid mechanics that uses numerical analysis and data structures to analyze and solve problems that involve fluid flows. Computers are used to perform the calculations required to simulate th ...

when the

Knudsen number The Knudsen number (Kn) is a dimensionless number defined as the ratio of the molecular mean free path length to a representative physical length scale. This length scale could be, for example, the radius of a body in a fluid. The number is named ...

is sufficiently small. This allows lab members to explore flows that would otherwise be too computationally expensive with a particle method. Work is currently being done to combine the two codes into a hybrid that uses MONACO when the flow is in the collisional nonequilibrium regime and LeMANS when the flow can be considered continuous. Current and past plasma and nonequilibrium flow projects include simulation of

ion thruster An ion thruster, ion drive, or ion engine is a form of electric propulsion used for spacecraft propulsion. It creates thrust by accelerating ions using electricity. An ion thruster ionizes a neutral gas by extracting some electrons out of a ...

Hall effect thruster In spacecraft propulsion, a Hall-effect thruster (HET) is a type of ion thruster in which the propellant is accelerated by an electric field. Hall-effect thrusters (based on the discovery by Edwin Hall) are sometimes referred to as Hall thruster ...

s, and

pulsed plasma thruster A pulsed plasma thruster (PPT), also known as a plasma jet engine, is a form of electric spacecraft propulsion. PPTs are generally considered the simplest form of electric spacecraft propulsion and were the first form of electric propulsion to be ...

s) as well as numerous

contracts to study reentry aerothermodynamics for space vehicles, including the

Crew Exploration Vehicle The Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) was a component of the U.S. NASA Vision for Space Exploration plan. A competition was held to design a spacecraft that could carry humans to the destinations envisioned by the plan. The winning design was th ...

. Other plasma research includes modeling wall ablation from

directed energy weapons A directed-energy weapon (DEW) is a ranged weapon that damages its target with highly focused energy without a solid projectile, including lasers, microwaves, particle beams, and sound beams. Potential applications of this technology include w ...

and the plasma-propellant interaction in electrothermal chemical guns.

Official website

https://www.colorado.edu/lab/ngpdl// {{DEFAULTSORT:Nonequilibrium Gas And Plasma Dynamics Laboratory University of Michigan Aerospace engineering organizations Plasma physics Plasma processing Computational fluid dynamics