Verification of the generalized reduced-order particle-in-cell scheme in a radial-azimuthal ExB plasma configuration

TL;DR

This paper verifies a novel reduced-order particle-in-cell scheme for plasma simulations in a Hall thruster configuration, demonstrating it can accurately reproduce complex plasma dynamics with significantly less computational cost.

Contribution

The paper introduces and validates a quasi-2D PIC scheme that reduces computational cost while maintaining accuracy in plasma simulations of Hall thrusters.

Findings

Quasi-2D PIC results converge to full-2D results as regions increase.

A 5-region quasi-2D simulation achieves ~10% ion density error.

The scheme reduces computational cost by a factor of 5.

Abstract

In this article, we present an in-depth verification of the generalized electrostatic reduced-order particle-in-cell (PIC) scheme in a cross electric and magnetic field configuration representative of a radial-azimuthal section of a Hall thruster. The setup of the simulations follows a well-established benchmark case. The main purpose of this effort is to demonstrate that our novel PIC scheme can reliably resolve the complex two-dimensional dynamics and interactions of the plasma instabilities in the radial-azimuthal coordinates of a Hall thruster at a fraction of the computational cost compared to full-2D PIC codes. To this end, we first present the benchmarking of our newly developed full-2D PIC code. Next, we provide an overview of the reduced-order PIC scheme and the resulting "quasi-2D" code, specifying that the degree of order reduction in the quasi-2D PIC is defined in terms of the number of "regions" along the simulation's directions used to divide the computational domain. We compare the predictions of the quasi-2D simulation in various approximation degrees of the 2D problem against our full-2D simulation results. We show that, by increasing the number of regions in the Q2D simulations, the quasi-2D results converge to the 2D ones. Nonetheless, we also highlight that a quasi-2D simulation that provides a factor of 5 reduction in the computational cost resolves the underlying physical processes in an almost indistinguishable manner with respect to the full-2D simulation and incurs a maximum error of only about 10 % in the ion number density and about 5 % in the electron temperature.