Curreli, an assistant professor in Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is collaborating with Dr. Sangwon Lee, Principal Researcher in Posco’s Thermo-Fluid and Process Research Group, and visiting scientist at NPRE. Posco is a multinational steel-making company headquartered in Pohang, South Korea. The company produces 43 million tons of steel per year for clients including automotive companies, construction firms, utilities, and much more.
Posco is interested in using an innovative plasma technology to deposit special ceramic coatings onto steel to greatly improve the manufacturing process and help with improving the microstructure of steel products. “Such deposition process has been achieved experimentally in controlled low-pressure chambers,” Lee said. “However, to become commercially viable, the process needs to happen at atmospheric pressure in facilities handling continuous processing of steel.
“We have experimentally achieved promising initial results at atmospheric pressure, but now we need to characterize the process both theoretically and numerically,” Lee continued. “The process requires a very sophisticated plasma with multiple chemical species, which in turn requires new data from specific plasma-physics and plasma-chemistry models. The complexity is pretty high and investigating the parameter space would take too long experimentally. That’s why we need advanced computation.”
Posco contacted Curreli to construct a numerical model of the plasma deposition process that will help Posco’s researchers to gain a better understanding on how the process works. “If we can understand it, we can optimize it. And if we can optimize it, we can reach the technical targets required to move to the next step of commercial viability,” Lee said.
Said Curreli, “We are currently looking at how the plasma is generated inside the source, how the electrical break down is happening, how the discharge reaches a steady state, and what are the most relevant chemical species and metastables participating to the reactions in plasma phase.
“We are also setting the ground to obtain new rate coefficients for the chemical species used by Posco’s process. This will be a first, since such data do not exist in the scientific literature yet, but they are necessary to address important optimization questions.”
The project involves researchers at Posco, Chonbuk National University, and Curreli’s team in NPRE. Together with his graduate student, Steven Marcinko, Curreli has the distinction of being the first scientist to model this innovative plasma process. Marcinko’s PhD activity focuses on the numerical modeling of atmospheric pressure plasmas with complex chemistry, a perfect fit to the technical challenges of Posco’s project.
“Working directly with a large company such as Posco is thrilling; I am really enjoying this research,” Curreli said. “The new plasma process has not only the potential of improving specific properties of Posco’s steels, but also the important benefit of saving millions of tons of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide released in the atmosphere every year. If this project will be successful, in few years there will be another confirmation that plasma modeling can have a direct impact to the society and to our world.”
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