The Department of Electrical, Electronic and Information Engineering, “Guglielmo Marconi” of University of Bologna and the Department of Mathematics, MOX – Modelling and Scientific Computing of Politecnico di Milano presented IPROP theoretical and numerical modeling at the 5th IEEE International Conference on Dielectrics (ICD).
The work investigates the effects of different plasma kinetic models on the results of a corona discharge simulation. The discharge model is based on the time dependent drift-diffusion approximation and uses a quasi-2D finite volume approach.
Simulations are carried out considering a wire-to-wire geometry, in which the electrode radii and their distance have been fixed. The electric current, number densities and the electro-hydro-dynamic force yielded by different treatments of the chemical source term in the continuity equation are compared. The evidences show that the employed kinetic model has a significant impact on the computed electro-hydro-dynamic force.
This is particularly important to accurately predict the performance of plasma devices for aerospace applications, such as ionic thrusters.
For more information on the article: https://www.iprop-project.eu/research/.