Papers › A fast solver for the spatially homogeneous electron Boltzmann equation

A fast solver for the spatially homogeneous electron Boltzmann equation

30 Aug 2024arXiv:2409.00207links table onlyarchive 2025-07-28

Milinda Fernando, Daniil Bochkov, James Almgren-Bell, Todd Oliver, Robert Moser, Philip Varghese, Laxminarayan Raja, George Biros

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We present a numerical method for the velocity-space, spatially homogeneous, collisional Boltzmann equation for electron transport in low-temperature plasma (LTP) conditions. Modeling LTP plasmas is useful in many applications, including advanced manufacturing, material processing, semiconductor processing, and hypersonics, to name a few. Most state-of-the-art methods for electron kinetics are based on Monte-Carlo sampling for collisions combined with Lagrangian particle-in-cell methods. We discuss an Eulerian solver that approximates the electron velocity distribution function using spherical harmonics (angular components) and B-splines (energy component). Our solver supports electron-heavy elastic and inelastic binary collisions, electron-electron Coulomb interactions, steady-state and transient dynamics, and an arbitrary nmber of angular terms in the electron distribution function. We report convergence results and compare our solver to two other codes: an in-house particle Monte-Carlo ethod; and Bolsig+, a state-of-the-art Eulerian solver for electron transport in LTPs. Furthermore, we use our solver to study the relaxation time scales of the higher-order anisotropic correction terms. Our code is open-source and provides an interface that allows coupling to multiphysics simulations of low-temperature plasmas.

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