AAAR 33rd Annual Conference
October 20 - October 24, 2014
Rosen Shingle Creek
Orlando, Florida, USA
Abstract View
Modelling of Fluid-Dynamic Transport of Growing Nanoparticles with a Turbulent-Like Plasma Jet
MASAYA SHIGETA, Osaka University
Abstract Number: 550 Working Group: Nanoparticles and Materials Synthesis
Abstract The mass-production of nanoparticles is still practically arduous by conventional methods. To overcome that problem, thermal plasmas have been anticipated as a promising tool for efficient fabrication of nanoparticles because thermal plasmas offer a very-high-temperature field with steep gradients at their fringes where many small nanoparticles are generated rapidly from the material vapor. However, it is still difficult to investigate the formation mechanism of nanoparticles generated in/around a thermal plasma because the process involves rapid phase conversions and transports by complicated convection due to fluid-dynamic instability as well as diffusion and thermophoresis.
Hence, this study performs numerical simulation to visualize the dynamic behavior of a thermal plasma flow and the transport of nanoparticles in growth. A model is developed to express the simultaneous nonequilibrium processes of the nanoparticles’ growth and transports. The model is simple but consistent so that it is suitable to transient problems which usually require high computational costs. Furthermore, an original simulation code with higher accuracy is developed to express a turbulent-like behavior of a thermal plasma jet and to capture shock-like steep gradients in the spatial distribution of nanoparticles.