Simulation of Plasma Expansion Using a Two-Timescale Accelerated Particle-in-Cell Method

Abstract

COLISEUM is an application programming interface which performs calculations of plasma propagation and interaction with arbitrary 3-D surfaces. The applications of COLISEUM are wide-ranging, but include simulating ion source configurations inside vacuum chambers and predicting sputtering and re-deposition on surfaces. COLISEUM allows users to easily define complicated 3-D geometries using off the shelf CAD software, then select from a set of plasma expansion models of varying fidelities and numerical complexity to perform the solution. Once the object surfaces are created, the user can run different types of simulations for the same geometry. With this system, low fidelity models can be used to verify the geometry and boundary conditions, and to obtain first-order predictions. Higher fidelity models are then used to obtain more accurate predictions with greater cost in computation time. Detailed plasma expansion calculations are performed with a particle-in-cell (PIC) algorithm which includes wall collisions and wall recombination. This paper presents an acceleration scheme which temporarily decouples the ion and neutral propagation loops to speed convergence.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Dec 15, 2003
Accession Number
ADA419529

Entities

People

  • D. B. Vangilder
  • J. M. Fife
  • M. R. Gibbons
  • M. Santi

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Air Force Research Laboratories
  • Algorithms
  • Computations
  • Geometry
  • Ion Sources
  • Materials
  • Particles
  • Ray Tracing
  • Reliability
  • Simulations
  • Steady State
  • Surface Properties
  • Test Facilities
  • Three Dimensional
  • United States
  • Vacuum Chambers

Fields of Study

  • Physics

Readers

  • Adaptive Control and Estimation with Uncertainty in Dynamic Systems.
  • Aerospace Propulsion Engineering.
  • Finite Element Method (FEM) for solving Partial Differential Equations (PDEs)