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Jeremiah J. Boerner - IEEE Xplore Author Profile

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Aleph is an unstructured 3D Particle-In-Cell (PIC) low temperature kinetic plasma code developed to model plasma discharges in low pressure systems. Self-consistent plasma evolution within electrostatic fields is treated using the Galerkin Finite-Element-Method (FEM) with particle collisions treated using the Direct Simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) method. Modeling the extreme range of length and tim...Show More
Aleph is a general-purpose kinetic plasma program well suited for simulating low temperature gas and plasma dynamics. Aleph implements the Particle-in-Cell and Direct Simulation Monte Carlo methods for use on 3D unstructured grids and highly parallel computing resources. Aleph is demonstrated to be well suited to evaluate new algorithms and physical models and to perform physically accurate simula...Show More
Nanosecond pulsed discharges provide versatile experimental and computational testbeds for the exploration of fundamental plasma physics. In particular, the fast rise time and short duration produce plasmas which are both spatially diffuse and uniform enough to probe experimentally and confine the kinetics of interest to sufficiently short time scales to be computationally tractable. This work wil...Show More
Collisions in a plasma can be very complex. Birdsall 1 showed methods and models to merge Particle-in-Cell (PIC) with Monte Carlo Collisions (MCC). Importantly, he pointed out that more atomic physics models were needed to treat collisions. Advances in computing hardware and software now enable large scale simulations of physical (vs. spherical cow) systems. However, treatment of collisions is inh...Show More
Summary form only given. In this talk we will present our recent work on simulating the discharge process in a microscale device using the PIC-DSMC simulation code Aleph. Microcavity discharges have been experimentally studied and computationally simulated, but to our knowledge there have been no completely kinetic simulations. The nominal breakdown process under consideration occurs due to a larg...Show More
Summary form only given. An electrostatic particle-in-cell code with complex boundary conditions and direct simulation Monte Carlo particle collisions performed on a separate, adaptable collision mesh is utilized to investigate DC breakdown after vacuum failure. Previously, it has been found that cold field electron emission can explain the breakdown voltage deviation from the Paschen curve measur...Show More
Summary form only given. An explicit, electrostatic particle-in-cell (PIC) code with complex boundary conditions and direct simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) particle collisions is utilized to investigate one dimensional direct current breakdown. Two electrodes are separated by a microscale gap with a non-uniform neutral gas distribution. For example, there may be a higher density near the anode as a ...Show More
Summary form only given. We have developed novel modeling approaches for simulation breakdown of vacuum arcs. Initiating an arc in vacuum spans many orders of magnitude in temporal and spatial scales, and number densities. We have developed specific approaches for each of these challenges-some more tested than others. These approaches are implemented in Aleph, a massively parallel 3D unstructured ...Show More
We present our current capabilities and plans targeting the simulation of 3D vacuum arc discharge in realistic geometries. Vacuum arc discharge is an incredibly challenging problem due to the enormous dynamic changes in plasma growth, collisional processes, and time scales. Our simulation model targets a co-planar Cu-Cu vacuum breakdown experiment. We will estimate the computational requirements f...Show More
An axisymmetric hybrid electron fluid particle-in-cell computational method is used extensively to simulate Faraday probe measurements for a range of plasma conditions and probe techniques. A new multigrid (MG) method is developed and implemented to speed up the simulations and allow larger domains to be simulated in a practical amount of time. The first study considers how different flowing ion d...Show More