The role of free electrons in the guiding of positive streamers

Abstract

The role of free electrons in the guiding of positive streamers View the table of contents for this issue, or go to the journal homepage for more 2016 Plasma Sources Sci. Technol. 25 044001

The 2017 Plasma Roadmap: Low temperature plasma science and technology

“…Advances in M&S include both gas phase plasmas and plasmasurface interactions, using, for example, molecular dynamics (MD) to obtain reaction probabilities of plasma produced species interacting with biological molecules [163]. There are also impressive advances in computational algorithms, from hybrid models and adaptive-mesh-refinement (AMR) [164,165] to radiation transport, which now enable time dependent and fully 3D simulations [164,165] (see figure 32). This broad use of M&S has been largely driven by applications and facilitated by the rapid and impressive adoption of commercial codes (CC), codes written by others (CWO) and open-source software (OSS) collaborations [166].…”

An adaptive Cartesian embedded boundary approach for fluid simulations of two- and three-dimensional low temperature plasma filaments in complex geometries

“…We remark that our temporal scheme requires 11 elliptic solves per time step. In addition, unlike [14,15,18,20], every species is convected so that the slope-limited upwind states that are required for the advection advance must be determined at every Runge-Kutta stage for both electrons, positive ions, and negative ions. The reason for this is that we require ion mobility for modeling of appropriate physical effects near electrodes and dielectrics, examples being surface charging of insulating surfaces or dynamics of cathode sheaths.…”

“…Decreased pressure therefore acts as a magnifying glass that allow simulations of larger domains and longer time scales. In our opinion, the simulations in [14,15] ran quite fast, within 24 hours on two Xeon E5-2680v4 processors. The results clearly demonstrate the benefits of using AMR.…”

“…Teunissen and Ebert [15] also report on three-dimensional streamer simulations through atmospheric-pressure nitrogen in plane-parallel 4 cm gaps. The same authors have also presented fully 3D simulations in (24 cm) 3 plane-parallel domains for oxygen-nitrogen mixtures at 133 mbar [14]. Note that for streamer discharges there is an inherent scaling with pressure; at decreasing pressures the physical length and time scales of the discharge increases.…”

“…In three dimensions, all results reported in the scientific literature to date rely on geometrical simplicity, such as plane-parallel electrodes [12,13,14,15] or point-plane gaps [16,17,18]. Some computer codes also rely on adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) for reducing the computational effort, a technique which becomes mandatory for large scale 3D simulations.…”