PIFE-PIC: Parallel Immersed-Finite-Element Particle-In-Cell For 3-D Kinetic Simulations of Plasma-Material Interactions

TL;DR

This paper introduces PIFE-PIC, a novel 3D parallel immersed-finite-element particle-in-cell simulation framework for plasma-material interactions, capable of handling complex geometries and large-scale computations efficiently.

Contribution

The paper presents a new 3D parallel IFE-PIC simulation model that effectively manages complex interfaces and demonstrates high-performance large-scale plasma simulations.

Findings

Validated with OML sheath simulation around a dielectric sphere.

Achieved large-scale plasma charging simulation with 520 million particles.

Demonstrated efficient parallel performance on high-performance computing systems.

Abstract

This paper presents a recently developed particle simulation code package PIFE-PIC, which is a novel three-dimensional (3-D) Parallel Immersed-Finite-Element (IFE) Particle-in-Cell (PIC) simulation model for particle simulations of plasma-material interactions. This framework is based on the recently developed non-homogeneous electrostatic IFE-PIC algorithm, which is designed to handle complex plasma-material interface conditions associated with irregular geometries using a Cartesian-mesh-based PIC. Three-dimensional domain decomposition is utilized for both the electrostatic field solver with IFE and the particle operations in PIC to distribute the computation among multiple processors. A simulation of the orbital-motion-limited (OML) sheath of a dielectric sphere immersed in a stationary plasma is carried out to validate PIFE-PIC and profile the parallel performance of the code package. Furthermore, a large-scale simulation of plasma charging at a lunar crater containing 2 million PIC cells (10 million FE/IFE cells) and about 520 million particles, running for 20,000 PIC steps in about 109 wall-clock hours, is presented to demonstrate the high-performance computing capability of PIFE-PIC.