A new paradigm for solving plasma fluid modeling equations

A new paradigm for solving plasma fluid modeling equations is proposed and verified in this paper. Model equations include continuity equations for charged species with drift-diffusion approximation, electron energy equation, and Poisson’s equation. Resulting discretized equations are solved jointly by the Newton–Krylov–Schwarz (NKS) [1] scheme by means of a parallelized toolkit called PETSc. All model equations are nondimensionalized and are discretized using fully implicit finite-difference method with the Scharfetter–Gummel scheme for the fluxes. At electrodes, thermal flux is considered for electrons, while both thermal and drift fluxes are considered for ions. A quasi-1D argon gas discharge with a radio frequency power source (13.56 MHz, Vp−p = 200 Volts), gap distance = 20 mm and 20 mm × 20 mm (100 × 100 mesh points) in size is used as the test case. Results of evolution of potential and plasma number density are shown Fig. 1, which are comparable to previous studies. Table 1 lists all the resulting timings of the present parallelized code using different combination of preconditioners (Additive