2020/11/20 by Daoru Han, Han, Daoru, Xiaoming He +5
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Computational Engineering #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Finance #Ionosphere and magnetosphere dynamics #Mathematical Software (cs.MS) #Planetary Science and Exploration #Plasma Diagnostics and Applications #and Science (cs.CE)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2011.10214
openalex publication_date 2020/11/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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 non-homogeneous 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 PIFE-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 520 million particles, running for 20,000 PIC steps in about 109 wall-clock hours, is presented to demonstrate the high-performance computing capability of PIFE-PIC.