Computational Plasma Dynamics Framework for Environmental and Medical Applications

Abstract

NTAPP non-thermal atmospheric pressure plasma (NTAPP) has become a paradigm shift technology that has dramatic environmental cleanup and medical therapeutic applications. Although there is rapid expansion in the study of experimental methods in the field, no overall computational framework that provides the tool to examine simultaneously the plasma physics with reactive oxygen and nitrogen species (RONS) kinetics, magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) and domain specific biological or chemical responses can be found in the literature. The paper introduces a new Computational Plasma Dynamics (CPD) system of drift-diffusion fluid equations, particle-in-cell (PIC) equations, MHD equations, and physics-informed neural network (PINN) augmentation layer as one multi-physics simulator. The framework is tested and confirmed on two benchmark scenarios, dielectric barrier discharge (DBD)-driven pollutant degradation in wastewater and cold atmospheric plasma (CAP)-mediated selective apoptosis in cancer tissue models. Simulation performance indicates 94.7% relative accuracy in hydroxyl radical concentration to experiment in the environmental case and a 91.3% relative accuracy in occurrences of reactive species flux in the medical case. The hybrid MHD-PIC coupling strategy allows reaching the 61-percent lowering in algorithm run time than full kinetic simulations. The suggested CPD framework provides a generalisable, scalable computational platform that can be used in the future in plasma-based environmental and therapeutic applications.