A numerical study of planar discharge motion

Abstract

Presented paper describes a numerical study of discharge plasma motion. This non-stationary phenomenon with steep gradients and sharp peaks in unknowns is described as a coupled problem of convection-diffusion equation with source term for electron, ion densities and Poisson’s equation for electric potential. The numerical method is 2nd order of accuracy in space and time and it uses dynamical adaptation of unstructured triangular mesh. Results of numerical studies included size of computational domain, type of boundary conditions and numerical convergence test are presented.

Keywords

• numerical study
• cold plasma
• refinement
• boundary conditions