Plasma sphere interaction - vonkarmaninstitute/pantera-pic-dsmc GitHub Wiki

Introduction

This tutorial case is intended to show the user how to setup a plasma simulation using hybrid approach, i.e. simulating electrons .

This example is inspired by the paper of C. Capon et al., 2019 that did a numerical reconstruction of original experiment on charged drag by E. D. Knechtel and W. C. Pitts, 1964. Charged drag comes from the interaction of charged particles and charged objects, sphere in this case, through electrostatic fields. The aim of this example is to reproduce the same result as in the paper by building the Pantera simulation step-by-step. This setup consists of hybrid Particle-in-Cell method, i.e. simulating electrons as fluid and other species (mainly ions) as particles while solving for the Poisson equation. This also includes the computation of the drag forces on any solid body using boundary analysis, either from direct collisions or from the electrostatic interaction.