An explicit scheme to enforce charge conservation in transient Particle-in-Cell simulations with Maxwell-Boltzmann electrons

Journal Article · Wed Feb 12 00:00:00 EST 2020 · Journal of Computational Physics

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcp.2020.109320· OSTI ID:1803238

Elias, Moutaz ^[1]; Curreli, Davide ^[2]

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1. Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL (United States); Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL (United States)
2. Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL (United States)

The Maxwell-Boltzmann electron model is a very popular approximation of the electronic behavior in electrostatic plasmas, adopted in all cases where the electron dynamics is governed only by a balance between electric and pressure forces. In such a model, the electron dynamics is reduced to solving for a nonlinear Poisson problem together with an additional expression enforcing charge conservation. In this work we derive an expression of charge conservation which can be conveniently applied to explicit schemes to update the reference Boltzmann density, particularly useful when simulating plasma sheaths. The scheme can be equally applied to both steady-state and transient problems. Two examples are shown, a steady-state plasma sheath, and a radio-frequency magnetic presheath. Our proposed scheme allows to enforce global charge conservation locally in time, and can thus be applied to the simulation of transient phenomena.

• Research Organization: Massachusetts Inst. of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA (United States); Princeton Plasma Physics Lab. (PPPL), Princeton, NJ (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE; USDOE Office of Science (SC), Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR). Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC); USDOE Office of Science (SC), Fusion Energy Sciences (FES)
• Grant/Contract Number: AC02-09CH11466; SC0018090
• OSTI ID: 1803238
• Alternate ID(s): OSTI ID: 1600591
• Journal Information: Journal of Computational Physics, Journal Name: Journal of Computational Physics Vol. 409; ISSN 0021-9991
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY
Maxwell Boltzmann charge conservation
RF sheaths
hybrid particle-in-cell