Weak scaling of the parallel immersed-finite-element particle-in-cell (PIFE-PIC) framework with lunar plasma charging simulations

• Published in: Computational particle mechanics Vol. 9; no. 6; pp. 1279 - 1291
• Main Authors: Lund, David, He, Xiaoming, Zhang, Xu, Han, Daoru
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cham Springer International Publishing 01.11.2022; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Charging; Classical and Continuum Physics; Computational Science and Engineering; Elevation angle; Engineering; Exact solutions; Iterative methods; Lunar surface; Macroparticles; Moon; Particle in cell technique; Performance tests; Photoelectrons; Scaling; Sheaths; Theoretical and Applied Mechanics; Particle in cell; Weak scaling; Immersed finite element; Plasma charging
• ISSN: 2196-4378; 2196-4386
• DOI: 10.1007/s40571-022-00470-0

Weak scaling performance of a recently developed fully kinetic, 3-D parallel immersed-finite-element particle-in-cell framework, namely PIFE-PIC, was investigated. A nominal 1-D plasma charging problem, the lunar photoelectron sheath at a low Sun elevation angle, was chosen to validate PIFE-PIC against recently derived semi-analytic solutions of a 1-D photoelectron sheath. The weak scaling performance test shows that the overall efficiency of PIFE-PIC is insensitive to the number of macroparticles and, counterintuitively, more domain decomposition iterations in the field-solve of PIC may lead to faster computing due to better convergence of field solutions at early stages of PIC iteration. The PIFE-PIC framework was then applied to simulate plasma charging of a wavy lunar surface with 324,000 cells and 150 million macroparticles demonstrating the capability of PIFE-PIC in resolving local-scale plasma environment near the surface of the Moon.