We present a new multi-fluid, multi-temperature plasma solver with adaptive Cartesian mesh (ACM) based on a full-Newton (non-linear, implicit) scheme for collisional low-temperature plasma. The particle transport is described using the drift-diffusion approximation for electrons and ions coupled to Poisson equation for electric field. In addition, the electron-energy transport equation is solved to account for electron thermal conductivity, Joule heating, and energy loss of electrons in collisions with neutral species. The rate of electron-induced ionization is a function of electron temperature and could also depend on electron density (important for plasma stratification). The ion and gas temperature are kept constant. The spatial discretization of the transport equations uses non-isothermal Scharfetter-Gummel scheme from semiconductor physics adapted for multi-dimensional ACM framework. We demonstrate the new solver for simulations of direct current (DC) and radio frequency (RF) discharges. The implicit treatment of the coupled equations allows using large time steps, and the full-Newton method enables fast non-linear convergence at each time step, offering greatly improved efficiency of fluid plasma simulations. We discuss the selection of time steps for solving different plasma problems. The new solver enables us to solve several problems we could not solve before with existing software: two- and three-dimensional structures of the entire DC discharges including cathode and anode regions with electric field reversals, normal cathode spot and anode ring, plasma stratification in diffuse and constricted DC discharges, and standing striations in RF discharges.
We propose an asymptotic-preserving (AP), uniformly convergent numerical scheme for the relativistic collisional Drift-Kinetic Equation (rDKE) to simulate runaway electrons in axisymmetric toroidal magnetic field geometries typical of tokamak devices. The approach is derived from an exact Green's function solution with numerical approximations of quantifiable impact, and results in a simple, two-step operator-split algorithm, consisting of a collisional Eulerian step, and a Lagrangian orbit-integration step with analytically prescribed kernels. The AP character of the approach is demonstrated …
Plasmas with varying collisionalities occur in many applications, such as tokamak edge regions, where the flows are characterized by significant variations in density and temperature. While a kinetic model is necessary for weakly-collisional high-temperature plasmas, high collisionality in colder regions render the equations numerically stiff due to disparate time scales. In this paper, we propose an implicit-explicit algorithm for such cases, where the collisional term is integrated implicitly in time, while the advective term is integrated explicitly in time, thus allowing time step sizes th…
We consider the solution of the fully kinetic (including electrons) Vlasov-Ampère system in a one-dimensional physical space and two-dimensional velocity space (1D-2V) for an arbitrary number of species with a time-implicit Eulerian algorithm. The problem of velocity-space meshing for disparate thermal and bulk velocities is dealt with by an adaptive coordinate transformation of the Vlasov equation for each species, which is then discretized, including the resulting inertial terms. Mass, momentum, and energy are conserved, and Gauss's law is enforced to within the nonlinear convergence toleran…
Upon application of a sufficiently strong electric field, electrons break away from thermal equilibrium and approach relativistic speeds. These highly energetic runaway electrons (MeV) play a significant role in tokamak disruption physics, and therefore their accurate understanding is essential to develop reliable mitigation strategies. For this purpose, we have developed a fully implicit solver for the 0D-2P (i.e., including two momenta coordinates) relativistic nonlinear Fokker-Planck equation (rFP). As in earlier implicit rFP studies (NORSE, CQL3D), electron-ion interactions are modeled usi…
Recently, a family of models that couple multifluid systems to the full Maxwell equations draw a lot of attention in laboratory, space, and astrophysical plasma modeling. These models are more complete descriptions of the plasma than reduced models like magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) since they naturally retain non-ideal effects like electron inertia, Hall term, pressure anisotropy/nongyrotropy, etc. One obstacle to broader application of these model is that an explicit treatment of their source terms leads to the need to resolve rapid kinetic processes like plasma oscillation and electron cyclotro…
We describe the implementation of kinetic solvers in 1d2v phase space using adaptive Cartesian mesh. Spherical coordinates in velocity space are used to simplify the Lorentz and Fokker-Planck collisional operators. The key capabilities of the new solvers are illustrated for electron elastic scattering, acceleration, continuous energy loss in collisions, and ionization processes in weakly-ionized plasma. We have also implemented two-stream approach to reduce computational cost for studies of gas breakdown dynamics in the presence of runaway electrons. The benefits and limitations of the non-spl…
Several different approaches are proposed for solving fully implicit discretizations of a simplified Boltzmann-Poisson system with a linear relaxation-type collision kernel. This system models the evolution of free electrons in semiconductor devices under a low-density assumption. At each implicit time step, the discretized system is formulated as a fixed-point problem, which can then be solved with a variety of methods. A key algorithmic component in all the approaches considered here is a recently developed sweeping algorithm for Vlasov-Poisson systems. A synthetic acceleration scheme has be…
Recently, a fully implicit, energy- and charge-conserving particle-in-cell method has been proposed for multi-scale, full-f kinetic simulations [G. Chen, et al., J. Comput. Phys. 230,18 (2011)]. The method employs a Jacobian-free Newton-Krylov (JFNK) solver, capable of using very large timesteps without loss of numerical stability or accuracy. A fundamental feature of the method is the segregation of particle-orbit computations from the field solver, while remaining fully self-consistent. This paper describes a very efficient, mixed-precision hybrid CPU-GPU implementation of the implicit PIC a…
At high Reynolds numbers, the use of explicit in time compressible flow simulations with spectral/$hp$ element discretization can become significantly limited by time step. To alleviate this limitation we extend the capability of the spectral/$hp$ element open-source software framework, Nektar++, to include an implicit discontinuous Galerkin compressible flow solver. The integration in time is carried out by a singly diagonally implicit Runge-Kutta method. The non-linear system arising from the implicit time integration is iteratively solved by the Jacobian-free Newton Krylov (JFNK) method. A …
With the advent of ultra-high power lasers the nonlinear nature of the vacuum of quantum electrodynamics (QED) can be probed. Due to the highly nonlinear structure of the underlying equations new numerical algorithms are required. A numerical scheme for simulating the nonlinear optical effects of the QED vacuum in up to 3 spatial dimensions plus time is derived. Its properties are discussed. The validity of the numerical approach is verified with the help of known analytic results. The algorithm is used to explore nonlinear all optical effects of the nonlinear vacuum for which analytic methods…
Implicit particle-in-cell codes offer advantages over their explicit counterparts in that they suffer weaker stability constraints on the need to resolve the higher frequency modes of the system. This feature may prove particularly valuable for modeling the interaction of high-intensity laser pulses with overcritical plasmas, in the case where the electrostatic modes in the denser regions are of negligible influence on the physical processes under study. To this goal, we have developed the new two-dimensional electromagnetic code ELIXIRS (standing for ELectromagnetic Implicit X-dimensional Ite…
We study the multi-dimensional radiative transfer phenomena using the ISMC scheme, in both gray and multi-frequency problems. Implicit Monte-Carlo (IMC) schemes have been in use for five decades. The basic algorithm yields teleportation errors, where photons propagate faster than the correct heat front velocity. Recently [Poëtte and Valentin, J. Comp. Phys., 412, 109405 (2020)], a new implicit scheme based on the semi-analog scheme was presented and tested in several one-dimensional gray problems. In this scheme, the material energy of the cell is carried by material-particles, and the photons…
We have developed a deterministic conservative solver for the inhomogeneous Fokker-Planck-Landau equation coupled with the Poisson equation, which is a {classical mean-field} primary model for collisional plasmas. Two subproblems, i.e. the Vlasov-Poisson problem and homogeneous Landau problem, are obtained through time-splitting methods, and treated separately by the Runge-Kutta Discontinuous Galerkin method and a conservative spectral method, respectively. To ensure conservation when projecting between the two different computing grids, a special conservation routine is designed to link the s…
The present paper addresses the development and implementation of the first high-order Flux Reconstruction (FR) solver for high-speed flows within the open-source COOLFluiD (Computational Object-Oriented Libraries for Fluid Dynamics) platform. The resulting solver is fully implicit and able to simulate compressible flow problems governed by either the Euler or the Navier-Stokes equations in two and three dimensions. Furthermore, it can run in parallel on multiple CPU-cores and is designed to handle unstructured grids consisting of both straight and curved edged quadrilateral or hexahedral elem…
This paper describes the main features of a pioneering unsteady solver for simulating ideal two-fluid plasmas on unstructured grids, taking profit of GPGPU (General-purpose computing on graphics processing units). The code, which has been implemented within the open source COOLFluiD platform, is implicit, second-order in time and space, relying upon a Finite Volume method for the spatial discretization and a three-point backward Euler for the time integration. In particular, the convective fluxes are computed by a multi-fluid version of the AUSM+up scheme for the plasma equations, in combinati…
A new flow solver scalable on multiple Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) for direct numerical simulation of wall-bounded incompressible flow is presented. This solver utilizes a previously reported work (J. Comp. Physics, vol. 352 (2018), pp.246-264) which proposes a semi-implicit fractional-step method on a single GPU. Extension of this work to accommodate multiple GPUs becomes inefficient when global transpose is used in the Alternating Direction Implicit (ADI) and Fourier-transform-based direct methods. A new strategy for designing an efficient multi-GPU solver is described to completely rem…
We develop a $ P $-multigrid solver to simulate locally preconditioned unsteady compressible Navier-Stokes equations at low Mach numbers with implicit high-order methods. Specifically, the high-order flux reconstruction/correction procedure via reconstruction (FR/CPR) method is employed for spatial discretization and the high-order time integration is conducted by means of the explicit first stage, singly diagonally implicit Runge-Kutta (ESDIRK) method. Local preconditioning is used to alleviate the stiffness of the compressible Navier-Stokes equations at low Mach numbers and is only conducted…
Time-implicit schemes are attractive since they allow numerical time steps that are much larger than those permitted by the Courant-Friedrich-Lewy criterion characterizing time-explicit methods. This advantage comes, however, with a cost: the solution of a system of nonlinear equations is required at each time step. In this work, the nonlinear system results from the discretization of the hydrodynamical equations with the Crank-Nicholson scheme. We compare the cost of different methods, based on Newton-Raphson iterations, to solve this nonlinear system, and benchmark their performances against…
This work is a continuation of our efforts to develop an efficient implicit solver for multidimensional hydrodynamics for the purpose of studying important physical processes in stellar interiors, such as turbulent convection and overshooting. We present an implicit solver that results from the combination of a Jacobian-Free Newton-Krylov method and a preconditioning technique tailored to the inviscid, compressible equations of stellar hydrodynamics. We assess the accuracy and performance of the solver for both 2D and 3D problems for Mach numbers down to $10^{-6}$. Although our applications co…
An implicit multiscale solver for steady kinetic equations based on wave-particle decomposition
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Shenzhen Research Institute, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学深圳研究院）；Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics（应用物理与计算力学研究所）
FlowPy is a numerical toolbox for the solution of partial differential equations encountered in Functional Renormalization Group equations. This toolbox compiles flow equations to fast machine code and is able to handle coupled systems of flow equations with full momentum dependence, which furthermore may be given implicitly.
The sequential fully implicit (SFI) scheme was introduced (Jenny et al. 2006) for solving coupled flow and transport problems. Each time step for SFI consists of an outer loop, in which there are inner Newton loops to implicitly and sequentially solve the pressure and transport sub-problems. In standard SFI, the sub-problems are usually solved with tight tolerances at every outer iteration. This can result in wasted computations that contribute little progress towards the coupled solution. The issue is known as `over-solving'. Our objective is to minimize the cost of inner solvers while mainta…
A fully implicit high-order preconditioned flux reconstruction/correction procedure via reconstruction (FR/CPR) method is developed to solve the compressible Navier-Stokes equations at low Mach numbers. A dual-time stepping approach with the second-order backward differentiation formula (BDF2) is employed to ensure temporal accuracy for unsteady flow simulation. When dynamic meshes are used to handle moving/deforming domains, the geometric conservation law (GCL) is implicitly enforced to eliminate errors due to the resolution discrepancy between BDF2 and the spatial FR/CPR discretization. The …
This article aims at developing a high order pressure-based solver for the solution of the 3D compressible Navier-Stokes system at all Mach numbers. We propose a cell-centered discretization of the governing equations that splits the fluxes into a fast and a slow scale part, that are treated implicitly and explicitly, respectively. A novel semi-implicit discretization is proposed for the kinetic energy as well as the enthalpy fluxes in the energy equation, hence avoiding any need of iterative solvers. The implicit discretization yields an elliptic equation on the pressure that can be solved fo…
Variational quantum algorithms offer a promising new paradigm for solving partial differential equations on near-term quantum computers. Here, we propose a variational quantum algorithm for solving a general evolution equation through implicit time-stepping of the Laplacian operator. The use of encoded source states informed by preceding solution vectors results in faster convergence compared to random re-initialization. Through statevector simulations of the heat equation, we demonstrate how the time complexity of our algorithm scales with the ansatz volume for gradient estimation and how the…
Compared to other symplectic integrators (the Wisdom and Holman map and its higher order generalizations) that also take advantage of the hierarchical nature of the motion of the planets around the central star, our methods require solving implicit equations at each time-step. We claim that, despite this disadvantage, FCIRK16 is more efficient than explicit symplectic integrators for high precision simulations thanks to: (i) its high order of precision, (ii) its easy parallelization, and (iii) its efficient mixed-precision implementation which reduces the effect of round-off errors. In additio…
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；European Centre For Medium Range Weather Forecasts（欧洲中期天气预报中心）；National Center for Atmospheric Research（美国国家大气研究中心）
It is tested whether machine learning methods can be used for preconditioning to increase the performance of the linear solver -- the backbone of the semi-implicit, grid-point model approach for weather and climate models. Embedding the machine-learning method within the framework of a linear solver circumvents potential robustness issues that machine learning approaches are often criticized for, as the linear solver ensures that a sufficient, pre-set level of accuracy is reached. The approach does not require prior availability of a conventional preconditioner and is highly flexible regarding…
In subsurface multiphase flow simulations, poor nonlinear solver performance is a significant runtime sink. The system of fully implicit mass balance equations is highly nonlinear and often difficult to solve for the nonlinear solver, generally Newton(-Raphson). Strong nonlinearities can cause Newton iterations to converge very slowly. This frequently results in time step cuts, leading to computationally expensive simulations. Much literature has looked into how to improve the nonlinear solver through enhancements or safeguarding updates. In this work, we take a different approach; we aim to i…
A cell-centered implicit-explicit updated Lagrangian finite volume scheme on unstructured grids is proposed for a unified first order hyperbolic formulation of continuum fluid and solid mechanics. The scheme provably respects the stiff relaxation limits of the continuous model at the fully discrete level, thus it is asymptotic preserving. Furthermore, the GCL is satisfied by a compatible discretization that makes use of a nodal solver to compute vertex-based fluxes that are used both for the motion of the computational mesh as well as for the time evolution of the governing PDEs. Second-order …
Semi-implicit time-stepping schemes for atmosphere and ocean models require elliptic solvers that work efficiently on modern supercomputers. This paper reports our study of the potential computational savings when using mixed precision arithmetic in the elliptic solvers. The essential components of a representative elliptic solver are run at precision levels as low as half (16 bits), and accompanied with a detailed evaluation of the impact of reduced precision on the solver convergence and the solution quality. A detailed inquiry into reduced precision requires a model configuration that is me…
