An implicit particle-in-cell model based on anisotropic immersed-finite-element method

This paper develops a two-dimensional implicit particle-in-cell model, which considers algorithms without and with magnetic field, based on the anisotropic immersed-finite-element method. The direct implicit particle-in-cell (DIPIC) algorithm is utilized to track the movement of electrons and ions, while the anisotropic immersed-finite-element method is developed to compute the electric field. Compared with the previous works, the immersed-finite-element direct implicit particle-incell (IFE-DIPIC) method developed in this article can use larger temporal and spatial step sizes to simulate the plasma problems and can handle the complex interface problems on a Cartesian mesh independent of the interface. Hence, the IFE-DIPIC method can significantly improve the computational efficiency, especially for the large-scale and long-time evolution plasma problems with complex interface. Numerical experiments are provided to demonstrate the proposed method and show the applicability in the simulations of plasma sheath problems. (C) 2020 Published by Elsevier B.V.

Automated summary

This paper presents a two-dimensional implicit particle-in-cell model for simulating plasma problems, which combines the direct implicit particle-in-cell algorithm and the anisotropic immersed-finite-element method to significantly improve computational efficiency.