Basic Science and Applications Intersecting Aerosol, Plasma, and Powder Technologies

Fundamental investigations about the behavior of aerosols can provide insights into underlying physics useful for defense applications. There is a need for methods to rapidly scale-up existing recipes for materials using plasmas.  Current research is being done to understand how runaway coagulation can be exploited to generate novel metastable materials on an industrial scale. This webinar will review physics investigations and applied research on this front. Another project related to dusty or complex plasmas will be discussed, where trajectories of grains are measured in an experiment to understand the properties of small clusters of charged grains and develop a way to calculate the entropy of a grain cluster or cloud. This is important because entropy is not just about thermodynamics but is also connected with information theory and data transmission. Lastly, current research on an ultrasonic powder dispersion technology capable of generating very high concentrations of aerosols from powders will be shared. This technology has been demonstrated to generate concentrations that are about 100,000 times denser than normal. Ways to translate this for applications like pulmonary aerosol drug delivery, upcycling plastics to produce fuel, and simulating aerosols encountered in explosions and battlefield conditions will be explored.