Hi! I'm wondering is that possible as stated in the title.
I think dusty plasma might be a potential candidate for energy storages, like Li battery, since the dust grains inside it could be charged into very high charge quantity. Unfortunately, most experiments show that the lasting time of the dusty plasmas is at the order of millisecond, once the discharging power is turned off.
However, the dusty plasma is much more complicated than a normal plasma which is already very complicated, there might be possibilities for some "impossible"s.
So, is there any clue for dusty plasmas to be a candidate of energy storage medium?
Dear Dr Cao---yes by invoking Debye's shielding effect: For a closer look please peruse the links as below:
Article Debye shielding in a dusty plasma with nonextensively distri...
Article A survey of dusty plasma physics
and :
Article Dusty Plasmas in the Laboratory, Industry, and Space
Regards--
No, it won't be possible because how would you maintain a charge accumulation with on a surface like a dust grain without any external electric fields? Every physical system tends to go into the state with the least overall energy and there is a lot of energy stored in an electric field created by free charges (this is actually, what you have to compensate with the external power that you feed into the discharge). What happens when you swithc off your power supply is that the electrons will either be captured by bypassing atoms/molecules and form radicals or the charge on the surface of a dust grain will drive the electrons away and they will be absorbed by your chamber wall.
Any cold plasma both dusty or not is a non-equilibrium system which can only exist when an external energy source is provided. After the power source is turned off plasma decays very rapidly.
With the permit of the venerable professors,
I think because of diffusion and recombination, the system state will be changed, but because you have a look at dust particles two-way properties of charge source and sink, it seems that if a platform for it is provided to create steady state conditions smartly, it is probably possible.
@ Farzad Abdollahi: the steady state in this case will be a neutral gas with dust grains without surface charge.
Rigorously speaking, if the dust were sufficiently radioactive, the plasma could exist without any additional or external energy source.
Dear Ijaz Durrani @ Ijaz Durrani , thanks for the recommended papers. It is still the problem how to maintain the Debye's shielding effect without any input energy.
@ Johannes Gruenwald , I agree with your point. The net charges will be eliminated by electric field. But, I'm thinking of a way extending the net-charge decaying time, like what happens to electrostatic friction.
@Farzad Abdollahi ,Yes, keeping the equilibrium between the sources and the sinks is the key, like using energetic medium, such as the radioactive dusts mentioned by Mikhail Yu. Yakimov. It might be hard for non-energy contained dusts to keep such equilibrium.
Electron Inertia will be involved in this case, Dr Cao: Please take a look at the following links:
Conference Paper Debye Shielding Model Revisited with Electron Inertia
Article Modified Debye-Hückel Electron Shielding and Penetration Factor
Regards--
Jinwen Cao, the Debye's shielding effect is energy costly. It involves a constant flow of charges of both kind upon the surface (e.g. of a dust particle).
Mikhail Yu. Yakimov, or a chemical reaction in the plasma.
As concerns chemical reactions, I am not sure if they will be able to produce enough energy to sustain the ionzation degree required, maybe except for some very special cases.
Mikhail Yu. Yakimov, well, if the plasma is heated by a chemical reaction, it should be in an equilibrium state. For the particles to stay solid it means very low temperatures and low ionization degrees. It looks more like some space object like a planetary nebula. It is not very practical at this civilization stage to store energy in nebulae.
Vassily Grigoriev Yes，it is a non-equilibrium system and approaches equilibrium eventually. What I thought is a possible way extending the decaying time, maybe something like drawing out portions of electrons or ions from the dusty plasmas.
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