Plasma Formation in Ambient Fluid from Hypervelocity Impacts

Shafquat Islam, Kevin Wang

Abstract

Ionization and plasma plumes have been detected in some hypervelocity impact experiments. However, knowledge of the plasma’s origin, composition, and energy is limited. We hypothesize that in atmospheric hypervelocity impacts, the ambient gas ionizes and contributes significantly to the plasma, despite the small amount of energy it receives. To test this hypothesis, we develop a fluid-solid coupled computational model that combines the multi-material compressible Navier-Stokes equations, a complete thermodynamic equation of state for each material, and a non-ideal, multi-species Saha equation for ionization prediction.