A hyperbolic-equation system approach for magnetized electron fluids in quasi-neutral plasmas

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hyperbolic-equation system (HES) method for modeling magnetized electron fluids in quasi-neutral plasmas, offering improved numerical stability and efficiency over traditional elliptic equation approaches.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel HES approach that avoids cross-diffusion terms, enhancing stability and computational efficiency in simulating strongly magnetized electron fluids.

Findings

HES approach robustly handles strong magnetic confinement

Comparable computational time to traditional methods

Fast convergence under magnetic confinement conditions

Abstract

A new approach using a hyperbolic-equation system (HES) is proposed to solve for the electron fluids in quasi-neutral plasmas. The HES approach avoids treatments of cross-diffusion terms which cause numerical instabilities in conventional approaches using an elliptic equation (EE). A test calculation reveals that the HES approach can robustly solve problems of strong magnetic confinement by using an upwind method. The computation time of the HES approach is compared with that of the EE approach in terms of the size of the problem and the strength of magnetic confinement. The results indicate that the HES approach can be used to solve problems in a simple structured mesh without increasing computational time compared to the EE approach and that it features fast convergence in conditions of strong magnetic confinement.