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Human/mechanical powered plasma: Researchers help create the future
Low-temperature plasmas offer promise for applications in medicine, water purification, agriculture, pollutant removal, nanomaterial synthesis and more. Yet making these plasmas by conventional methods takes several thousand volts of electricity, says David Go, an aerospace and mechanical engineer at the University of Notre Dame. That limits their use outside high-voltage power settings.
Researcher Federico Hita fine-tunes a hand-cranked piezoelectric device developed to generate plasma. Photo: University of Notre Dame
In work, Go and a team of researchers conducted research that explores making plasma devices that can be operated without electrical power -- they need only human or mechanical energy.
Their paper introduces a strategy the scientists call "energy-conversion plasma" as an alternative to producing "transient spark" discharges without the need for a very high-voltage power supply.
The researchers designed, fabricated and tested a hand-cranked piezoelectric device to generate the plasma.
The device includes a snail-shell shaped actuator that compresses a conventional gas grill igniter made from a piezoelectric crystal to form the plasma.
When the piezoelectric crystal is compressed, it is polarized and generates a surface voltage high enough to initiate a plasma.
The snail-shell allows the igniter to reset quickly so that one plasma discharge can be generated with each revolution, no matter how fast a person cranks the device.
The team found that manually created energy-conversion plasma could be most useful when integrated into devices that have rotating parts or naturally produce vibrations, such as internal combustion engines with oscillating pistons.
For example, energy-conversion plasmas could make the combustion process in cars, airplanes and cruise ships more fuel efficient. (National Science Foundation)
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