Affiliations: Department of Aerospace & Ocean Engineering,
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA 24061,
USA | Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA 91109,
USA | Department of Physics, University of California, Los
Angles, CA 90095, USA
Note: [] Corresponding author: Joseph Wang, Department of Aerospace and
Ocean Engineering, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061-0203, USA. Tel.: +1 540
231 8114; Fax: +1 540 231 9632; E-mail: jowang@vt.edu
Abstract: A parallel, three-dimensional electrostatic PIC code is developed
for large-scale electric propulsion simulations using parallel supercomputers.
This code uses a newly developed immersed-finite-element particle-in-cell
(IFE-PIC) algorithm designed to handle complex boundary conditions accurately
while maintaining the computational speed of the standard PIC code. Domain
decomposition is used in both field solve and particle push to divide the
computation among processors. Two simulations studies are presented to
demonstrate the capability of the code. The first is a full particle simulation
of near-thruster plume using real ion to electron mass ratio. The second is a
high-resolution simulation of multiple ion thruster plume interactions for a
realistic spacecraft using a domain enclosing the entire solar array panel.
Performance benchmarks show that the IFE-PIC achieves a high parallel
efficiency of ⩾90%
