Spectral solver for multi-scale plasma physics simulations with dynamically adaptive number of moments

Journal Article · Mon Jun 01 00:00:00 EDT 2015 · Procedia Computer Science

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2015.05.284· OSTI ID:1201750

Vencels, Juris ^[1]; Delzanno, Gian Luca ^[2]; Johnson, Alec ^[3]; Peng, Ivy Bo ^[1]; Laure, Erwin ^[1]; Markidis, Stefano ^[1]

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1. Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm (Sweden)
2. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
3. Centre for Mathematical Plasma Astrophysics (CmPA) (Belgium)

A spectral method for kinetic plasma simulations based on the expansion of the velocity distribution function in a variable number of Hermite polynomials is presented. The method is based on a set of non-linear equations that is solved to determine the coefficients of the Hermite expansion satisfying the Vlasov and Poisson equations. In this paper, we first show that this technique combines the fluid and kinetic approaches into one framework. Second, we present an adaptive strategy to increase and decrease the number of Hermite functions dynamically during the simulation. The technique is applied to the Landau damping and two-stream instability test problems. Performance results show 21% and 47% saving of total simulation time in the Landau and two-stream instability test cases, respectively.

• Research Organization: Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE
• OSTI ID: 1201750
• Journal Information: Procedia Computer Science, Vol. 51, Issue C; ISSN 1877-0509
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY
plasma simulations
spectral methods
fluid-kinetic coupling