Sputtered atom transport calculation via Radiosity View Factor Model and particle data compression

Abstract

Sputter deposition calculation adds a major cost to a complete electric propulsion plume simulation due to the significantly lower velocities of sputtered atoms compared to plume ions. Simulation time is reduced considerably by decoupling the sputtered atom transport from the full plume simulation and solving sputter deposition via the non-Maxwellian Radiosity View Factor model. In order to do this, the incident ion or sputtered atom particle data are compressed on the fly and used in the subsequent simulation to construct the velocity distribution functions of the outgoing sputtered atoms in an interpolatable form. This paper explores several different methods enabling this approach and demonstrates the benefit in terms of accuracy, speed, and memory usage.