2020 Papers

Posted on September 15th, 2020
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The purpose of this post is to summarize papers published, or at least drafted, in 2020.

Published

Zolotukhin, Daniels, Brieda, Keidar, “Onset of the magnetized arc and its effect on the momentum of a low-power two-stage pulsed magneto-plasma-dynamic thruster”, AIP Phys. Rev. E

This paper, mainly written by D. Zolotukhin, presented very interesting experimental results from a study of the impact of applied magnets on the thrust of a small vacuum arc thruster for Cubesat applications. Denis found that, with magnet, there is a threshold voltage that results to a significant increase in thrust compared to the no-magnet case. I ran a quick simulation using Starfish that seems to confirm formation of a \(\vec{j}\times\vec{B}\) force.

Figure 1. Experimentally-derived thrust for a case with and without a magnet and results from a PIC simulation.

Brieda, Laugharm, “Optimization, Development, and Validation of the Contamination Transport Simulation Code”, SPIE Optics & Photonics

This really fun paper ended up being bit of a kitchen sink summarizing numerous improvements to my Contamination Transport Simulation Program. The paper started by describing code optimization, including a rewrite of the octree to use a Morton Z-curve, the addition of parallelization with MPI and multithreading, creation of an HTML GUI, summary of new molecular and particulate models (which are already somewhat out of date), DSMC, and a preliminary write up from a planned experimental validation.

Figure 2. Automatic output of coefficient of variation from parallel runs (left) and an HTML-based GUI (right)

Figure 3. Testing of a new vapor-pressure based surface desorption model (left) and DSMC used to model gas flow past a complex shape (right)

Figure 4. Dust collected on a microscope slide left exposed in an office environment for 2 weeks (left), and as visualized under a compound microscope (right)

Work in Progress

The following papers are in a various form of progress (all have at least been started, some are almost ready for submission). I am including them all here to keep myself accountable! Hopefully by the end of the year, many will move over to the section above.

Plume Potential Models

This paper focuses on plasma potential models for hybrid-PIC simulations

PIC-DSMC Parallelization

This paper discusses a novel scheme for parallelizing PIC-DSMC simulations

HET Plume Coupling

This paper describes a code developed to simulate a Hall Thruster and its coupling with a plume code to study facility effects

Vacuum Arc Modeling

Here we used a GPU code to simulate the breakdown in a vacuum arc

Surface Layer

This paper describes the recently developed scheme for dynamic modeling of the surface layer

Starfish Summary

Paper describing features and validation of my 2D PIC/rarefied gas code Starfish.

Contamination Modeling

This paper describes modeling contamination deposition modeling during the deployment sequence of an upcoming satellite.