An efficient algorithm for corona simulation with complex chemical models

Abstract

The simulation of cold plasma discharges is a leading field of applied sciences with many applications ranging from pollutant control to surface treatment. Many of these applications call for the development of novel numerical techniques to implement fully three-dimensional corona solvers that can utilize complex and physically detailed chemical databases. This is a challenging task since it multiplies the difficulties inherent to a three-dimensional approach by the complexity of databases comprising tens of chemical species and hundreds of reactions. In this paper a novel approach, capable of reducing significantly the computational burden, is developed. The proposed method is based on a proper time stepping algorithm capable of decomposing the original problem into simpler ones: each of them has then been tackled with either finite element, finite volume or ordinary differential equations solvers. This last solver deals with the chemical model and its efficient implementation is one of the main contributions of this work.