TY - JOUR
T1 - A Self-Consistent Open Boundary Condition for Fully Kinetic Plasma Thruster Plume Simulations
AU - Jambunathan, Revathi
AU - Levin, Deborah A.
N1 - Funding Information:
Manuscript received April 25, 2019; revised August 5, 2019 and November 4, 2019; accepted December 17, 2019. Date of publication February 7, 2020; date of current version March 10, 2020. This work was supported in part by AFOSR under Grant AF FA9550-16-1-0193, in part by the National Science Foundation through the Blue Waters Sustained-Petascale Computing Project under Grant OCI-0725070 and Grant ACI-1238993, and in part by the state of Illinois. The review of this article was arranged by Senior Editor F. Taccogna. (Corresponding author: Revathi Jambunathan.) The authors are with the Department of Aerospace Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801 USA (e-mail: rjam-bunathan@ lbl.gov).
Funding Information:
ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors are grateful for the funding support provided by AFOST through the GRANT AF FA9550-16-1-0193. This research is part of the Blue Waters sustained-petascale computing project, which is supported by the National Science Foundation (awards OCI-0725070 and ACI-1238993) and the state of Illinois. Blue Waters is a joint effort of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and its National Center for Supercomputing Applications. The authors also acknowledge XSEDE for providing the computational resource on XStream.
Publisher Copyright:
© 1973-2012 IEEE.
PY - 2020/3
Y1 - 2020/3
N2 - A new, charge-conserving, energy-based, open boundary condition (BC) is developed and used to perform steady-state plasma plume simulations. This BC prevents the numerical instability, which is typically observed for kinetic simulations that employ the traditional outflow boundary, and thus allows the fully kinetic plume simulations to reach a steady-state with finite computational domain sizes. In addition to modeling a plume with colocated electron-ion sources, the BC is also applied to separated electron-ion sources which model realistic thrusters with a separate external neutralizer configuration without assuming quasi-neutrality. Domain-independence simulations performed with the new open boundary construct showed that the electric field obtained from small and large domain sizes agree within 2%. For the separated electron-ion plume, the minimum domain size required to obtain convergence is such that it must accommodate the plume until the charge density decreases by an order of magnitude. The computational cost of the electrostatic particle-in-cell simulation was found to decrease by a factor of four when the domain size was decreased by one-half.
AB - A new, charge-conserving, energy-based, open boundary condition (BC) is developed and used to perform steady-state plasma plume simulations. This BC prevents the numerical instability, which is typically observed for kinetic simulations that employ the traditional outflow boundary, and thus allows the fully kinetic plume simulations to reach a steady-state with finite computational domain sizes. In addition to modeling a plume with colocated electron-ion sources, the BC is also applied to separated electron-ion sources which model realistic thrusters with a separate external neutralizer configuration without assuming quasi-neutrality. Domain-independence simulations performed with the new open boundary construct showed that the electric field obtained from small and large domain sizes agree within 2%. For the separated electron-ion plume, the minimum domain size required to obtain convergence is such that it must accommodate the plume until the charge density decreases by an order of magnitude. The computational cost of the electrostatic particle-in-cell simulation was found to decrease by a factor of four when the domain size was decreased by one-half.
KW - Ion thruster plasma plume
KW - neutralization
KW - open boundary condition (BC)
KW - particle-in-cell (PIC)
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U2 - 10.1109/TPS.2020.2968887
DO - 10.1109/TPS.2020.2968887
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85081924455
SN - 0093-3813
VL - 48
SP - 610
EP - 630
JO - IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science
JF - IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science
IS - 3
M1 - 8986756
ER -