A Numerical Method to Simulate Radio-Frequency Plasma Discharges

Discretization of the Joule heating term for plasma discharge fluid models in unstructured meshes

“…This technique has been used by several authors on structured meshes [6,10,13]. Using this approach, the Joule heating is evaluated as follows for a two-dimensional structured mesh (see Fig.…”

“…These models provide spatial and temporal information on averaged properties such as species density and species temperature in discharges and the electromagnetic fields in the discharge. A wide variety of plasmas such as low-pressure glow discharges [1][2][3], radio-frequency plasma discharges [4][5][6], dielectric barrier discharges [7], microdischarges [8][9][10][11] and streamers [12] have been simulated using the fluid modeling framework. A typical fluid model solves the following governing equations.…”

Scaled-Up Nonequilibrium Air Plasmas

“…This gives: e where D^ is the electron diffusion coefficient and //^ is the electron mobility. Now, for numerical reasons, [35] it is more convenient to write the electron velocity in terms of the logarithmic derivative of the electron number density:…”

On accuracy and performance of high-order finite volume methods in local mean energy model of non-thermal plasmas

“…These include first-order upwind [26,39,10,35,36], central difference [40], Scharfetter-Gummel [24,25,12,41,16,17,21] finite difference schemes, and the finite element method [4][5][6]11]. Spectral methods are promoted as more appropriate and include a spectral element [42] and a Chebyshev-collocation spectral (with single domain) scheme [19].…”

“…Our long term aim, however, is to use this 'benchmarking' study to produce a code that can both efficiently and accurately simulate RF plasma physics in three-dimensional complex geometries. In doing so, we will systematically examine the numerical treatment of different terms in the transport equations and establish the viability and the accuracy of our method against more sophisticated spectral methods, since it is suggested that the accurate solution of the local mean energy model equations requires very high-order spatial descritization [42,40].…”