The Aerospace Plasma Group’s fuel-system lightning-protection research addresses a central challenge in aircraft certification: assessing the risk that a lightning strike will ignite fuel-air mixtures inside an aircraft’s fuel tanks. This project continues previous research into the physics of spark discharge behavior across varying gap geometries, pressures, and gas environments relevant to real fuel-tank conditions, and will focus on expanding the testbed’s capabilities along three fronts: developing hardware for repeatable, precisely sequenced spark and instrumentation timing, developing an electrode configuration to study short-gap breakdown, where classical Paschen scaling breaks down due to field emission, and developing a capability to control humidity in the reactor as an additional experimental variable. I will be supporting this development work, contributing to hardware design, diagnostic integration, and postprocessing of any resulting data. This will help expand the range of conditions the testbed can access and provide new validation data for a numerical model being developed as a separate project within the group.

As I finish my degree in AeroAstro and prepare for graduate studies, I’m drawn to this project’s combination of hands-on experimental work and its relevance to a real aircraft certification problem. In graduate school, I hope to pursue research in space propulsion and plasmas, and this SuperUROP offers a chance to experience that kind of research firsthand while building the background in plasma physics that’s been missing from my coursework.