Chen Cui

University of Virginia | UVa · Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Grid-based Vlasov simulations are carried out to re-evaluate the one-dimensional collisionless plasma expansion into vacuum. The grid-based method eliminates the inherent statistical noise in particle-based methods and allows us to extend the solution beyond the self-similar expansion region and resolve small electron timescale wave perturbations....

A grid-based Vlasov simulation model is developed to simulate the two-dimensional unmagnetized electric propulsion (EP) plasma beam emission process. Comparing to the standard fully kinetic Particle-in-Cell simulation, the grid-based Vlasov simulation method eliminates the interference of particle noise and is capable of resolving higher-order velo...

Particle-in-Cell simulations and statistical analysis are carried out to study the dynamic evolution of a collisionless, magnetized plasma with co-existing whistler turbulence and electron temperature anisotropy as the initial condition, and the competing consequences of whistler turbulence cascade and whistler anisotropy instability growth. The re...

A charge and current deposition method is presented for electromagnetic particle-in-cell simulations in 3D cylindrical coordinates using Yee’s grid. The method is a direct extension of Villasenor and Buneman’s current deposition method from Cartesian to 3D cylindrical coordinates, through computing the volumes swept by cylindrical sector charges ov...

The physics of ionic electrospray propulsion spans multiple length scales. This paper combines a molecular dynamics model, a particle–particle model, and a particle-in-cell model to investigate the physics of ionic electrospray propulsion over 9 orders of magnitude in length scale. The combined models are applied to simulate beam emission for an io...

View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2022-1618.vid We present the development progress of a parallel, multi-dimensional grid-based Vlasov solver, Vlasolver. The Vlasov equation is solved using the third order Positive Flux Conservation (PFC) scheme, and the parallelization of the code is implemented using domain decomposition and MPI....

We present a parallel, multi-dimensional grid-based Vlasov solver (Vlasolver) for plasma plume simulations. The Vlasov-Poisson system is solved using the third order Positive Flux Conservation (PFC) scheme and the parallelization of the code is implemented using domain decomposition and MPI. We find that the grid-based Vlasov method is advantageous...

The particle–particle (PP) model has a growing number of applications in plasma simulations, because of its high accuracy of solving Coulomb collisions. One of the main issues restricting the practical use of the PP model is its large computational cost, which is now becoming acceptable thanks to state-of-art parallel computing techniques. Another...

Fully kinetic Particle-in-Cell simulations are carried out to study the neutralization process of pure ionic electrospray thruster bi-polar operation. We find that beam neutralization is achieved mainly through ion bouncing inside a potential well established between the beam front and the exit along the beam direction. The alternating acceleration...

Previous fully kinetic PIC simulations showed that the electrons in the plasma plume emitted from electric propulsion thrusters are non-equilibrium and the electron tempera- ture is anisotropic. To further study the electron kinetic properties in plasma expansion and to reduce the interference from numerical noise in particle simulations, this stud...