PIFE-PIC: Parallel Immersed Finite Element Particle-in-cell for 3-D Kinetic Simulations of Plasma-material Interactions

Abstract

This paper presents a recently developed particle simulation code package PIFE-PIC, which is a novel three-dimensional (3-D) parallel immersed finite element (IFE) particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation model for particle simulations of plasma-material interactions. This framework is based on the recently developed nonhomogeneous electrostatic IFE-PIC algorithm, which is designed to handle complex plasma-material interface conditions associated with irregular geometries using a Cartesian mesh-based PIC. Three-dimensional domain decomposition is utilized for both the electrostatic field solver with IFE and the particle operations in PIC to distribute the computation among multiple processors. A simulation of the orbital motion-limited (OML) sheath of a dielectric sphere immersed in a stationary plasma is carried out to validate parallel IFE-PIC and profile the parallel performance of the code package. Furthermore, a large-scale simulation of plasma charging at a lunar crater containing 2 million PIC cells (10 million FE/IFE cells) and about 1 billion particles, running for 20,000 PIC steps in about 154 wall-clock hours, is presented to demonstrate the high-performance computing capability of PIFE-PIC.

Department(s)

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Second Department

Mathematics and Statistics

Comments

National Science Foundation, Grant 2005272

Keywords and Phrases

Immersed finite element; Parallel domain decomposition; Particle-in-cell; Plasma-material interactions

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

1095-7197; 1064-8275

Document Type

Article - Journal

Document Version

Final Version

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2024 Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, All rights reserved.

Publication Date

01 Jan 2021

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