Date of Award
2024
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Science (MS)
Department
Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Committee Chair
Babak Shotorban
Committee Member
Jason Cassibry
Committee Member
Farbod Fahimi
Research Advisor
Babak Shotorban
Subject(s)
Dusty plasmas--Simulation methods, Graphics processing units
Abstract
Dusty plasmas are characterized by micro to nanometer sized particles interacting with ions and electrons in a plasma. Dust grains interact with each other via Coulomb forces as they acquire electric charge through the collection of electrons and ions. This interaction can generate crystalline structures because of mutual repulsion and produce collective behaviors. Under the influence of gravity, dust crystals are squeezed into a two-dimensional monolayer. In microgravity, three-dimensional crystal structures and a broad range of collective behavior are possible as dust grain interaction forces and plasma effects become dominant. In this study, dusty plasmas were modeled via a continuum description of the plasma coupled with a kinetic description of dust particles where grains are tracked by solving for the grain charge, position, and velocity in response to forces from the plasma background and the interactions between dust particles. Most notably, numerical tools were developed and implemented to conduct the simulations via the parallel processing capabilities of a graphics processing unit (GPU) to vastly accelerate computation speed. The significant speedup in processing allows a two orders of magnitude increase in number of simulated particles within the constraints of computational resources. This speedup begins to allow the computational investigation of collective grain dynamics within the microgravity experiments with a very large number dust particles in an rf plasma reactor. The GPU enabling software modifications and efficiency gains were validated with respect to previous simulations on a gravitational condition.
Recommended Citation
Applegate, Aaron A., "GPU acceleration of kinetic simulations of dust particles in RF plasmas" (2024). Theses. 703.
https://louis.uah.edu/uah-theses/703