A parallel hybrid numerical algorithm for simulating gas flow and gas discharge of an atmospheric-pressure plasma jet

Development of a hybrid numerical algorithm which couples weakly with the gas flow model (GFM) and the plasma fluid model (PFM) for simulating an atmospheric-pressure plasma jet (APPJ) and its acceleration by two approaches is presented. The weak coupling between gas flow and discharge is introduced by transferring between the results obtained from the steady-state solution of the GFM and cycle-averaged solution of the PFM respectively. Approaches of reducing the overall runtime include parallel computing of the GFM and the PFM solvers, and employing a temporal multi-scale method (TMSM) for PFM. Parallel computing of both solvers is realized using the domain decomposition method with the message passing interface (MPI) on distributed-memory machines. The TMSM considers only chemical reactions by ignoring the transport terms when integrating temporally the continuity equations of heavy species at each time step, and then the transport terms are restored only at an interval of time marching steps. The total reduction of runtime is 47% by applying the TMSM to the APPJ example presented in this study. Application of the proposed hybrid algorithm is demonstrated by simulating a parallel-plate helium APPJ impinging onto a substrate, which the cycle-averaged properties of the 200th cycle are presented. The distribution patterns of species densities are strongly correlated by the background gas flow pattern, which shows that consideration of gas flow in APPJ simulations is critical. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.