Low-pressure glow discharges (LPGD) are of topical interest for many applications such as lasers, plasma treatments and illuminators.
Simulations of LPGD have been reported in many works. Most of the numerical models for LPGDs used the monoatomic gases (especially argon) as background gases and failed to consider the excited species, which is essential for energy transport and chemical reaction mechanisms in plasma simulations and provides a more comprehensive understanding of the plasma dynamics.
Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) has several advantages such as simple calculation procedure, easy handling of complex geometries and simple implementation of parallel computation. In the last decades, the LBM has been utilized as an attractive method for fluid dynamics simulations such as multi-phase flows, multi-component flows and reactive flows.
In the applications of the LBM for plasma simulations, the coupling scheme of electrons and heavy species is important for the accuracy and stability of numerical simulations because of the huge difference between their parameters. For this combination, some interpolations and assumptions, which were used in previous studies, might lead to numerical errors.
Kim Yong Jun, a researcher at the Faculty of Physical Engineering, has proposed a mathematical model that uses the LBM to simulate the DC argon glow discharge.
He obtained the DC glow discharge through one- and two-dimension analyses, and compared them with the previous results.
The proposed model can be used as a mathematical model for simulating the nonequilibrium atomic (or molecular) plasmas with not only multi-components and multi-reactions, but also several electrode structures.
You can find more information in his paper “Lattice Boltzmann Simulation of Direct-current Glow Discharge at Low Pressure” in “International Journal of Modeling, Simulation, and Scientific Computing” (SCI).
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