Doctoral seminar

Simulation of Rarefied Plasma Flows:
The presented project deals with the simulation of rarefied plasma flows for an unsteady (or pulsed) magnetoplasmadynamic (IMPD) thruster. Here, the continuum assumption fails, and we have to base the modelling on the Boltzmann equations and turn to the simulation of discrete macro-particles. The presented work aims at providing a hybrid numerical framework for the simulation of such plasma flows. The main building block is an electromagnetic Particle-In-Cell (PIC) method which admits a self-consistent charged particle simulation in electromagnetic fields generated by external sources and the self-fields of the particles. A field solver and a particle tracking of high order accuracy are implemented to enable an efficient simulation in complex three-dimensional geometries. This standard physical modelling is extended by a Direct-Simulation-Monte-Carlo (DSMC) module and a Fokker-Planck-solver to include short and long range interactions between like an unlike particles. The combination of these different methods allows a general approach to the simulation of rarefied plasma flows with applications such as electric space propulsion systems or industrial plasma sources. The number of physical particles to be simulated for the IMPD thruster is in the order of 10^19. The numerical modelling of this high number of particles requires a distributed computation. The particle algorithms and the field solver are therefore parallelized using a domain decomposition approach. Simulation results obtained with this solver will be presented and compared with analytical solutions as well as other methods.

Speaker: Jonathan Neudorfer

Date: Monday, Januar 18, 2010

Time: 16:15

Location: Seminar Room 102, German Research School for Simulation Sciences, Schinkelstr. 2a, 52062 Aachen