Electron–Ion Coupling in Mesothermal Plasma Beam Emission: Full Particle PIC Simulations

Wang, J.; Chang, Ouliang; Cao, Yong

doi:10.1109/tps.2011.2179066

Cited by 39 publications

(37 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…It is conjectured that most of the features uncovered must be common to weakly magnetized or non-magnetized vacuum expansions, although, except for numerical simulations, 3 this has not been explored in detail. One avenue for extending the work in that direction is the idea of an electrostatic invariant that was broached in our earlier work on cusp flows.…”

Section: Moments and Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Despite early feasibility concerns when Ion Engines were first developed, 1,2 expansions of this sort are now routine in many fields. With the advent of powerful simulation tools, modelers have been able to show that indeed, a steady collision-free expansion is possible, 3 but by their nature, these simulations do not fully disclose the mechanisms that are involved. They do, however, illustrate the importance of a trapped electron population that develops during the start-up transient.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Electron cooling and finite potential drop in a magnetized plasma expansion

2015

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The steady, collisionless, slender flow of a magnetized plasma into a surrounding vacuum is considered. The ion component is modeled as mono-energetic, while electrons are assumed Maxwellian upstream. The magnetic field has a convergent-divergent geometry, and attention is restricted to its paraxial region, so that 2D and drift effects are ignored. By using the conservation of energy and magnetic moment of particles and the quasi-neutrality condition, the ambipolar electric field and the distribution functions of both species are calculated self-consistently, paying attention to the existence of effective potential barriers associated to magnetic mirroring. The solution is used to find the total potential drop for a set of upstream conditions, plus the axial evolution of various moments of interest (density, temperatures, and heat fluxes). The results illuminate the behavior of magnetic nozzles, plasma jets, and other configurations of interest, showing, in particular, in the divergent plasma the collisionless cooling of electrons, and the generation of collisionless electron heat fluxes. V C 2015 AIP Publishing LLC.

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Section: Moments and Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Electron cooling and finite potential drop in a magnetized plasma expansion

2015

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“…Wheelock et al studied the kinetic effects in ion beam neutralization both analytically [21] and using a fully kinetic PIC simulation model [22]. Recently, Wang et al [23] presented a fully kinetic PIC simulation of the emission of a collisionless mesothermal plasma plume using the real-ion-to-electron mass ratio to preserve the correct mesothermal characteristics of the flow. The focus of [23] is on the electron-ion coupling process inside the beam.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Recently, Wang et al [23] presented a fully kinetic PIC simulation of the emission of a collisionless mesothermal plasma plume using the real-ion-to-electron mass ratio to preserve the correct mesothermal characteristics of the flow. The focus of [23] is on the electron-ion coupling process inside the beam. They established that during the emission of a collisionless mesothermal plasma beam, thermal electrons are trapped in a potential well between the emission surface and the propagating beam front along the beam direction.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Electron Properties in Collisionless Mesothermal Plasma Expansion: Fully Kinetic Simulations

Wang

2015

IEEE Trans. Plasma Sci.

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This paper presents a fully kinetic particle-in-cell simulation of collisionless mesothermal plasma expansion with a focus on the macroscopic electron properties. The results show that the electron thermal properties are anisotropic and nonuniform. In the beam core region, the electrons are thermalized due to interactions between the trapped electrons and the potential well between the beam exit and the beam front. The electron expansion inside the beam is equilibrium and significant cooling occurs associated with the expansion. Immediately out of the beam boundary, the electrons undergo an isothermal expansion. In the outer expansion region, the electrons transition into a nonequilibrium expansion and again exhibit significant cooling. We find that the commonly used assumption of Boltzmann electron simplification is not valid for modeling electrons in mesothermal plasma expansion. An analysis of the electron temperature and density correlation along each individual ion streamlines suggests that simplified models for electron dynamics may be constructed using multiple polytropic laws in different plume regions.Index Terms-Boltzmann relation, collisionless plasma expansion, electron kinetics, particle-in-cell (PIC).

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“…The use of boundary-fitted grids in the context of PIC is not new. Various approaches have been documented in the literature in non-uniform, curvilinear, or unstructured grids using finite-difference methods [3,4], finite-volume methods [5,6], and finite-element methods [7,8] in many application domains such as microwave modeling [9], plasma propulsion modeling [10], astrophysics [11][12][13], and fusion simulations [14,15]. It should be noted that, to the best of our knowledge, none of these algorithms satisfies the discrete charge continuity equation exactly, or conserves energy or momentum exactly in a non-uniform grid with discrete time-stepping.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A curvilinear, fully implicit, conservative electromagnetic PIC algorithm in multiple dimensions

Chacòn

Chen

2016

Journal of Computational Physics

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We extend a recently proposed fully implicit PIC algorithm for the Vlasov-Darwin model in multiple dimensions (Chen and Chacón (2015) [1]) to curvilinear geometry. As in the Cartesian case, the approach is based on a potential formulation (φ, A), and overcomes many difficulties of traditional semi-implicit Darwin PIC algorithms. Conservation theorems for local charge and global energy are derived in curvilinear representation, and then enforced discretely by a careful choice of the discretization of field and particle equations. Additionally, the algorithm conserves canonical-momentum in any ignorable direction, and preserves the Coulomb gauge ∇ · A = 0 exactly. An asymptotically well-posed fluid preconditioner allows efficient use of large cell sizes, which are determined by accuracy considerations, not stability, and can be orders of magnitude larger than required in a standard explicit electromagnetic PIC simulation. We demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency properties of the algorithm with numerical experiments in mapped meshes in 1D-3V and 2D-3V.

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Electron–Ion Coupling in Mesothermal Plasma Beam Emission: Full Particle PIC Simulations

Cited by 39 publications

References 11 publications

Electron cooling and finite potential drop in a magnetized plasma expansion

Electron cooling and finite potential drop in a magnetized plasma expansion

Electron Properties in Collisionless Mesothermal Plasma Expansion: Fully Kinetic Simulations

A curvilinear, fully implicit, conservative electromagnetic PIC algorithm in multiple dimensions

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