Verification of the generalized reduced-order particle-in-cell scheme in a radial-azimuthal E×B plasma configuration
File(s)
Published version
Author(s)
Faraji, Farbod
Reza, Maryam
Knoll, Aaron
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
In this article, we present an in-depth verification of the generalized electrostatic reduced-order particle-in-cell (PIC) scheme in a cross electric and magnetic field configuration representative of a radial-azimuthal section of a Hall thruster. The setup of the simulations follows a well-established benchmark case. The main purpose of this effort is to demonstrate that our novel PIC scheme can reliably resolve the complex two-dimensional dynamics and interactions of the plasma instabilities in the radial-azimuthal coordinates of a Hall thruster at a fraction of the computational cost compared to full-2D PIC codes. To this end, we first present the benchmarking of our newly developed full-2D PIC code. Next, we provide an overview of the reduced-order PIC scheme and the resulting “quasi-2D” code, specifying that the degree of order reduction in the quasi-2D PIC is defined in terms of the number of “regions” along the simulation’s directions used to divide the computational domain. We compare the predictions of the quasi-2D simulation in various approximation degrees of the 2D problem against our full-2D simulation results. We show that, by increasing the number of regions in the Q2D simulations, the quasi-2D results converge to the 2D ones. Nonetheless, we also highlight that a quasi-2D simulation that provides a factor of 5 reduction in the computational cost resolves the underlying physical processes in an almost indistinguishable manner with respect to the full-2D simulation and incurs a L2-norm error of only about 2 % in the ion number density and below 1 % in the electron temperature.
Date Issued
2023-02-01
Date Acceptance
2023-01-12
Citation
AIP Advances, 2023, 13 (2)
ISSN
2158-3226
Publisher
American Institute of Physics
Journal / Book Title
AIP Advances
Volume
13
Issue
2
Copyright Statement
© 2023 Author(s). All article content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
License URL
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
ARTN 025315
Date Publish Online
2023-02-03