Skip to main content
U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Numerical experiments on unstructured PIC stability.

Technical Report ·
DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1013241· OSTI ID:1013241
Particle-In-Cell (PIC) is a method for plasmas simulation. Particles are pushed with Verlet time integration. Fields are modeled using finite differences on a tensor product mesh (cells). The Unstructured PIC methods studied here use instead finite element discretizations on unstructured (simplicial) meshes. PIC is constrained by stability limits (upper bounds) on mesh and time step sizes. Numerical evidence (2D) and analysis will be presented showing that similar bounds constrain unstructured PIC.
Research Organization:
Sandia National Laboratories
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE
DOE Contract Number:
AC04-94AL85000
OSTI ID:
1013241
Report Number(s):
SAND2011-2969
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English