AAE graduate student Gayathri Shivkumar won the Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society (NPSS) Student Paper Award at the 44th International Conference on Plasma Science (ICOPS 2017). The award acknowledges outstanding student contributions and encourages greater student participation as principal or sole authors of papers. Shivkumar is a student of AAE Prof. Alina Alexeenko.

Shivkumar’s paper was titled 'Modeling of Capacitively Coupled RF Discharge with Non-Sinusoidal Input Waveform.' It is part of a scalable nanomanufacturing project to grow cost efficient carbon nanostructures. The interdisciplinary project is being done in collaboration with Prof. Timothy Fisher's group in Purdue’s School of Mechanical Engineering.

The goal of the project is to model the plasma in a roll-to-roll radio frequency chemical vapor deposition system (located at Birck Nanotechnology Center) to optimize the growth of graphene, graphitic nanopetals and carbon nanotubes. As a first step, the group modeled argon plasma in the system and found the existence of alpha discharges at low frequencies for non-sinusoidal input voltage waveforms. This kind of a discharge was previously thought to be non-existent at low frequencies. These findings are corroborated by experiments performed by Majed Alrefae from Prof. Fisher's group in ME. 

The work was presented at the IEEE ICOPS 2017 held in Atlantic City, NJ. Nine students were chosen as finalists for the student paper competition, and Shivkumar was one of two winners.

Other authors on this paper are: Siva Sashank Tholeti (MSAAE ‘13, PhD AAE ’16), Majed Alrefae, Prof. Sergey Macheret, Prof. Timothy Fisher and Prof. Alina Alexeenko.