General moment system for plasma physics based on minimum entropy principle

Abstract

In plasma physics domain, the electrons transport can be described from kinetic and hydrodynamical models. Both methods present disadvantages and thus cannot be considered in practical computations for Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF). That is why we propose in this paper a new model which is intermediate between these two descriptions. More precisely, the derivation of such models is based on an angular closure in the phase space and retains only the energy of particles as a kinetic variable. The closure of the moment system is obtained from a minimum entropy principle. The resulting continuous model is proved to satisfy fundamental properties. Moreover the model is discretized w.r.t the energy variable and the semi-discretized scheme is shown to satisfy conservation properties and entropy decay.