Dr Trevor Lafleur

Trevor is a physicist and engineer with over 14 years of experience in the fields of plasma physics and space propulsion. He has B.Sc. degrees in Aeronautical Engineering, and Experimental and Theoretical Physics, from the University of the Witwatersrand, and holds a Ph.D. in Physics from The Australian National University. He has previously worked in academia/research at Ecole Polytechnique in France, ONERA – The French Aerospace Lab, and with the French National Space Agency (CNES). He is the founder of PlasmaPotential – a business providing technical consulting to companies in the semiconductor and space industries, and is a former Principal Engineer and Program Manager at ThrustMe – a French deeptech company in the space industry.

He has made fundamental and applied contributions to the physics of radio-frequency plasmas and plasma instabilities, and helped to pioneer the new field of voltage waveform tailoring for capacitively coupled plasmas. He has also been involved in the development of five new plasma propulsion concepts, and was part of the team at ThrustMe that designed and demonstrated the world’s first iodine-fuelled electric propulsion system in space (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04015-y).

Trevor is an Associate Editor and part of the editorial board of one of the leading plasma physics and engineering journals, Plasma Sources Science and Technology (PSST): https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/0963-0252

His current research interests include:

• Space propulsion
• Alternative propellants
• Ionospheric plasma-satellite aerodynamics
• High-enthalpy plasma-gas flows for ground- and space-based applications
• Fundamental low-temperature plasma physics
• Verification and validation of theoretical and numerical plasma simulation models

Trevor has the following Ph.D. projects available:

• Iodine-fuelled neutralizers for electric propulsion systems (https://www.unsw.edu.au/research/hdr/our-projects/iodine-fuelled-neutralizers-for-electric-propulsion-systems)

Ph.D. scholarships ($35,000 per year) are available from the university for high-achieving students (with H1/High Distinction in undergraduate and/or Masters by Research) in engineering, mathematics, physics, or other relevant fields.