Optimization of Argon Plasma Working Pressure through Parallel PIC Simulations for Enhancement of Material Surface Treatment

TL;DR

This paper presents a parallel PIC simulation method to optimize argon plasma pressure, revealing the pressure that maximizes ion flux for improved material surface treatment.

Contribution

Developed a parallel PIC simulation approach to efficiently determine optimal argon plasma pressure for surface modification applications.

Findings

Optimal pressure for maximum ion flux is 100 mTorr at -500 V.

Parallel simulation reduces computation time for plasma modeling.

Ion flux increases with electrode potential.

Abstract

In this study, a novel method for simulating plasma dynamics using parallel programming has been developed. The equations based on Particle-in-Cell (PIC) method were utilized and adapted for this purpose. We utilized 35 processors from Sharif High Performance Computing (HPC) center and divided the plasma volume into 35 parts, with each part's PIC equation solved on a separate processor. Once the computations were completed, the results from all processors were combined to form a complete plasma volume. The simulations revealed that there is an optimal pressure for argon, at which the ion flux onto the electrode surface is maximized. Increasing the absolute value of the electrode potential also increases this flux. Therefore, for a given potential, selecting the optimal pressure is crucial for the most effective surface modification using argon plasma. In this work, for applied voltage of -500 V, the optimum pressure was 100 mTorr.