An improved immersed finte element particle-in-cell method for plasma simulation
For researchers simulating plasma with complex interfaces, this incremental improvement combines existing methods to enhance accuracy and conservation properties.
The paper presents an improved immersed finite element particle-in-cell (IFE-PIC) method for plasma simulation, enhancing accuracy via a partially penalized IFE solver and ensuring charge conservation through a new interpolation technique. Numerical examples demonstrate improved performance.
The particle-in-cell (PIC) method has been widely used for plasma simulation, because of its noise-reduction capability and moderate computational cost. The immersed finite element (IFE) method is efficient for solving interface problems on Cartesian meshes, which is desirable for PIC method. The combination of these two methods provides an effective tool for plasma simulation with complex interface/boundary. This paper introduces an improved IFE-PIC method that enhances the performance in both IFE and PIC aspects. For the electric field solver, we adopt the newly developed partially penalized IFE method with enhanced accuracy. For PIC implementation, we introduce a new interpolation technique to ensure the conservation of the charge. Numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the features of the improved IFE-PIC method.