Three-Dimensional Wedge Simulation Of An Ionization Wave In Nitrogen/Helium Gas

• Main Authors: Fierro, Andrew S., Moore, Chris H., Hopkins, Matthew M.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• ISSN: 2576-7208
• DOI: 10.1109/PLASMA.2017.8496045

Three-dimensional simulations of pulsed plasma formation in non-equilibrium conditions still represents a significant challenge even for modern supercomputers. The high-resolution time and length scales required to accurately simulate near-atmospheric pressure ionization waves or streamers are on the order of femtosecond and tens of nanometers, respectively. To alleviate some of the most demanding computational requirements, only a 10 degree wedge of a needleplane gap with a 250 micron gap distance is simulated. Regardless, this results in nearly 200 million mesh elements while simultaneously tracking hundreds of millions of computational particles. Simulation time is on the order of many days on 5000 processing cores executed on the Sky Bridge supercomputer at Sandia National Laboratories.