Kinetic modeling of plasmas for biomedical and industrial applications

Understanding the physical and chemical phenomena governing reactive species in non thermal atmospheric-pressure plasmas is crucial for improving the operation of cold plasma devices and their applications. This work focuses on kinetic modeling and simulations of different types of non-thermal plasmas generators. In the first part, a novel two-stage kinetic model is developed to simulate O3 and NO2 dynamics in a surface dielectric barrier discharge, over time spans of hundreds of seconds. The second part of the work begins with a theoretical background on vibrational excitation and the calculation of the rate constants related to the reactions involving vibrationally-excited N2 molecules. A reaction set including these processes is developed and used to simulate a volumetric dielectric barrier discharge reactor working in filamentary regime (when powered by a sinusoidal voltage source). The focus is set on N2 vibrational distribution function, its temporal evolution and the effect that it has on the reactive species production. The same reaction set is then adopted to simulate a volume DBD powered by a nano-pulsed voltage generator in flow conditions, working in diffuse regime. The simulation results are compared against experimental measurements of NO concentration during a single nano-pulse, obtained by the EPFL plasma group using laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) spectroscopy. In the final part of the work, a computational model for the chemical kinetics of the ionization region of a corona discharge is presented, with a particular focus on the charged species that play a central role in corona-propulsion applications.