Immersed Finite Element Particle-in-Cell Simulations of Plasma Charging at the Lunar Terminator

Reactive molecular dynamics simulations are carried out to study water formation and retention during impacts by nanometer sized micrometeoroids on lunar surface at the atomic-scale. Results show that water molecules are generated and lost simultaneously during an impact. For a hydroxylated surface under average solar wind condition, the water molecules produced by a nanometer sized cosmic dust with an impact velocity of 8 km/s to 20 km/s ranges from about 44% to 275% of that existed before impact. However, the increase in water content at the impact site is only from 5% to 73% due to ejections caused by impact. While micrometeoroid impact may generate a substantial amount of new water molecules, the amount of water lost to space also increases significantly at higher impact velocities. Hence, the increase in local lunar water content is strongly affected by the impact velocity. Plain Language SummaryWe present the first atomic-scale simulation study of lunar water formation during micrometeoroid impacts. The simulation resolves water molecule formation and loss as well as lunar surface deformation during impacts, and determines quantitatively the water formation and retention rate at the impact site. HUANG ET AL.

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“…30 km/s (Han et al, 2018;Yu et al, 2015). Hence, we consider the proton impingement flux at lunar surface to be    3 10 7 2 / cm s ( ).…”

Section: Formulationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Molecular Dynamics Simulations of Water Formation and Retention by Micrometeoroid Impact on Lunar Surface

Huang

Nomura

Wang

2021

Geophysical Research Letters

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“…In this paper, a 3D fully kinetic immersed-finite-element particle-in-cell model, USC-IFEPIC, [4,22,29,47] is applied to obtain the plasma environment and the electric field around a small asteroid. The USC-IFEPIC model is a 3-D full particle electrostatic PIC code designed to simulate plasma interactions with arbitrarily shaped dielectric objects.…”

Section: Plasma Interaction and Chargingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The USC-IFEPIC model was validated against the 1D analytical solutions of [20,26] in Ref. [4], and was previously applied to simulate lunar surface charging [47], asteroid charging [22], and charged dust dynamics around small asteroids [39].…”

Section: Plasma Interaction and Chargingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hovering of an Electrically Actuated Spacecraft in a Small-Body Plasma Field

Bechini

Quadrelli

Lavagna

et al. 2021

Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets

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The paper presents simulation models and an analysis of the hovering capability of an electrostatic spacecraft around a small celestial body. The hovering capabilities of an electrically actuated spacecraft are evaluated by combining orbital dynamics analysis with threedimensional fully kinetic particle-in-cell simulations of asteroid/spacecraft interactions with the solar wind plasma. The zero velocity curves obtained from the analysis allow the identification of the equilibrium points for different levels of charge. The analysis of the system equilibria indicates the presence of equilibrium points in the combined gravitational, electrostatic, and solar illumination field, most of which can be obtained by charging the spacecraft negatively. The charge-to-mass ratio needed to hover is obtained for different orbital positions, and an analysis of the sensitivity of the equilibria with respect to the spacecraft equivalent radius and with respect to the Sun-to-Main Body distance provides additional insight into the system dynamics. Nomenclature d Main-Body-to-Sun distance, m h Angular Momentum, m 2 /s a Semi-Major Axis, m e Eccentricity, -

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“…The detailed IFE formulation and IFE-PIC steps are archived in [30] and the flowchart of the serial IFE-PIC algorithm is shown in Figure 2.4. Over the past few years, the IFE-PIC method has matured to successfully model plasma dynamics problems arising from many space applications, such as ion thruster grid optics [40,41], ion propulsion plume-induced contamination [43,60,26], charging of lunar and asteroidal surfaces [25,30,28,13,29,27,63], and dust transport dynamics around small asteroids [64]. 2.6).…”

Section: Parallel Ife-pic Algorithmsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Han¹,

He²,

Lund³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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This paper presents a recently developed particle simulation code package PIFE-PIC, which is a novel threedimensional (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 orbitalmotion-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.

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Immersed Finite Element Particle-in-Cell Simulations of Plasma Charging at the Lunar Terminator

Cited by 26 publications

References 31 publications

Molecular Dynamics Simulations of Water Formation and Retention by Micrometeoroid Impact on Lunar Surface

Molecular Dynamics Simulations of Water Formation and Retention by Micrometeoroid Impact on Lunar Surface

Hovering of an Electrically Actuated Spacecraft in a Small-Body Plasma Field

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

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