Lecturer: Prof. Yiguang Ju, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University

Time: August 20, from 10:00 am

Place: Conference Room 1, Department of Thermal Engineering

Abstract:

Plasma assisted combustion is a promising technology to improve engine performance, increase lean burn flame stability, reduce emissions, and enhance low temperature fuel oxidation and processing. Over the last decade, significant progresses have been made towards the applications of plasma in engines and the understanding of the fundamental chemistry and dynamic processes in plasma assisted combustion via the synergetic efforts in advanced diagnostics, combustion chemistry, flame theory, and kinetic modeling. New observations of plasma assisted ignition enhancement, ultra-lean combustion, cool flames, flameless combustion, and controllability of plasma discharge have been reported. Advances in understanding of non-thermal and thermal enhancement effects, kinetic pathways of atomic O production, diagnostics of electronically and vibrationally excited species, plasma combustion kinetics of sub-explosion limit ignition, plasma assisted low temperature combustion, flame regime transition of the classical ignition S-curve, dynamics of the minimum ignition energy, and the transport effect by non-equilibrium plasma discharge. These findings and advances have provided new opportunities in the development of efficient plasma discharges for practical applications and predictive, validated kinetic models and modeling tools for plasma assisted combustion at low temperature and high pressure conditions. This article is to provide a comprehensive overview of the progress and the gap of knowledge of plasma assisted combustion in applications, chemistry, ignition and flame dynamics, experimental methods, diagnostics, kinetic modeling, and discharge control.

Biographical Sketch:

Yiguang Ju is a Robert Porter Patterson Professor at Princeton University. His bachelor degree in Engineering Thermophyiscs from Tsinghua University in 1986, and his PhD degree in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Tohoku University in 1994. He was appointed as an Assistant and Associate Professor at Tohoku University in 1995 and 1998, and as a Changjiang Professor and the Director of Thermophysics Institute at Tsinghua University in 2000. He joined Princeton University in 2001 and became a full professor in 2011. Prof. Ju’s research interests include combustion and propulsion in the area of near limit combustion, microscale combustion, plasma assisted propulsion, alternative fuels, chemical kinetics, multiscale modeling, and functional nano-materials. He has published more than 140 refereed journal articles. He is an ASME Fellow and a board member of Combustion Institute of Eastern States. He received a number of awards including the Young Investigators Award (1999) at the First Asia Pacific Conference on Combustion, the Best Paper Award (1999) by the Japan Society for Aeronautical and Space Sciences, the Yangzi River Scholar Award (2000) by the Chinese Education Ministry, the National Outstanding Young Scholar award from NSFC (2001), the Distinguished Paper Award from the Thirty-third International Symposium on Combustion (2010), the NASA Director’s Certificate of Appreciation award (2011), the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2011), the Hsue-Shen Tsien Professorship of Engineering Sciences of Institute of Mechanics at Chinese Academy of Science (2013), and the Robert Porter Patterson Professor of Princeton University (2013).