2025 Year in Review
Year 2025 saw me transition into a full time Aerospace Engineering faculty role at Cal Poly, SLO. See the article to learn more about my future activities.
PIC-C Blog
Answers from Kinetics
Latest posts
2024 SCTC and IEPC Debrief
I spent the last two weeks of June 2024 in southern France attending two back-to-back technical conferences: SCTC and IEPC. This post is a brief debrief and a summary of the presented research.
Development of a Solid Fuel Adamantane Ion Thruster
This post summarizes current work by the USC undergraduate student club ASPEN to develop a solid fuel plasma thruster operating on Adamantane.
Dust Dynamics at Mesoscale Resolution
We report on an ongoing project to simulate lunar regolith adhesion to spacesuits and study its removal due to mechanical actions, compressed air application, and exposure to plasma. High speed videos are also provided.
Experimental investigation of QCM-derived sticking coefficients
In this post we describe a campaign at USC Dept of Astronautical Engineering and at Blue Origin in Kent, WA to determine whether experimentally derived temperature varying sticking coefficients can be used to model gray-body contaminant mass transport. As expected, the answer was found to be no. These results were presented at the 2022 SPIE Optics and Photonics conference.
JWST Contamination Deposition Analysis
This article briefly describes recent work of analyzing water ice and molecular contaminant deposition during the 180 day commissioning phase of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). More details can be found in our 2022 SPIE Optics Photonics paper.
CAD Based Particle Simulation Code
We demonstrated as part of a NASA SBIR effort the ability to run particle simulations directly with CAD geometries. Such a mesh-less approach is expected to lead to massive reductions in labor cost and the ability to rerun simulations whenever the design changes.
Quasi Steady-State Testing Approach for High Power Hall Thrusters
In the late 2021, I, along with Drs. Yevgeny Raitses, Edgar Choueiri, Roger Myers, and Prof. Michael Keidar published a paper in Journal of Applied Physics special issue on electric propulsion on a concept of testing high-power Hall thrusters using a pulse operation (doi:10.1063/5.0067232). This work involved performing numerical simulations with a modified version of [ ]
Introduction to Plasma Simulation Methods (2023)
Introduction to Plasma Simulation Methods (2023) Contact Info Instructor: Dr. Lubos Brieda, lubos.brieda@particleincell.com TA: Phineas Kelly, pbkelly@usc.edu Announcements August 14th, 2023: Slides and examples for our final lesson are now posted. Remember that we will be starting 30 minutes early. August 9th, 2023: We will start 30 minutes earlier (9 am PT) next week as [ ]
2020 Papers
The purpose of this post is to summarize papers published, or at least drafted, in 2020. Published Zolotukhin, Daniels, Brieda, Keidar, Onset of the magnetized arc and its effect on the momentum of a low-power two-stage pulsed magneto-plasma-dynamic thruster , AIP Phys. Rev. E This paper, mainly written by D. Zolotukhin, presented very interesting experimental results [ ]