The Nonequilibrium Gas and Plasma Dynamics Laboratory (NGPDL) at the Aerospace Engineering Department of the University of Colorado Boulder is headed by Professor Iain D. Boyd and performs research of nonequilibrium gases and plasmas involving the development of physical models for various gas systems of interest, numerical algorithms on the latest supercomputers, and the application of challenging flows for several exciting projects.
Instead, the lab has adopted a microscopic approach in which the atoms/molecules in a gas and the ions/electrons in a plasma are simulated on computationally using a large number of model particles within sophisticated Monte Carlo methods.
The lab has developed a general 2D/axi-symmetric/3D code, MONACO, for simulating nonequilibrium neutral flows that can run either on scalar workstations or in a parallel computing environment.
The lab also has developed a general 2D/axi-symmetric/3D code, LeMANS, to numerically solve the Navier-Stokes equations using computational fluid dynamics when the Knudsen number is sufficiently small.
Other plasma research includes modeling wall ablation from directed energy weapons and the plasma-propellant interaction in electrothermal chemical guns.