SPPARK—a novel generalized simulation tool for non-equilibrium plasma chemistry

Plasma applications in the chemical industry are gaining interest due to the possibility of improving the environmental sustainability of chemical processes in their electrification scenario while also favoring their circularity. To allow the possibility of an in-depth understanding of the fundamental chemical mechanisms, zero-dimensional plasma-chemistry numerical models are often adopted to simulate the time evolution of plasma-gas systems. To increase the physical representativeness of numerical models a novel, fully customizable, plasma chemistry solver simulation platform for plasma assisted reactive kinetics has been developed by runtime coupling Cantera (dealing with the rigorous time integration of the chemical ordinary differential equation system) to Bolsig+ (dealing with the detailed description of electron kinetics). A complete description of its modeling capabilities is here presented together with the validation results obtained by the comparison against the state-of-the-art solver ZDPlasKin.