Adaptive Strategies to Fast Multipole Method in Photoionization Calculations

Abstract

Recently, a new framework to compute the photoionization rate in streamer discharges accurately and efficiently using the integral form and the fast multipole method (FMM) was presented. This paper further improves the efficiency of this framework with adaptive strategies. The adaptive strategies are based on the magnitude of radiation and the electric field during the streamer propagation, and are applied to the selection of the source and target points. The accuracy and efficiency of this adaptive FMM are studied quantitatively for different domain sizes, pressures and adaptive criteria, in comparison with some existing efficient approaches to compute the photoionization. It is shown that appropriate adaptive strategies reduce the calculation time of the FMM greatly, and maintain the high accuracy that the numerical error is still much smaller than other models based on partial differential equations. The performance of the proposed adaptive method is also studied for a three-dimensional positive streamer interacting problem with a plasma cloud.