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NASA NTRS1992

Particle simulations of driven collisionless magnetic reconnection at the dayside magnetopause

Particle simulations (including both ions and electrons) of the driven collisionless magnetic reconnection process at the earth's dayside magnetopause were carried out using a specially developed two-and-one-half-dimensional electromagnetic particle code with a driven inflow boundary and an open outflow boundary. The simulations were used to examine many features associated with the dayside magnetic reconnection process, including the acceleration and heating of particles and the generation of energetic particles and particle heat flux. In addition, the fluctuating electromagnetic field associated with a driven collisionless magnetic reconnection was examined and compared with the satellite observations of flux transfer events at the day-side magnetopause.

Ding, D. Q.↗

NASA NTRS1988

Implementation of a hypersonic rarefied flow particle simulation on the Connection Machine

A very efficient direct particle simulation algorithm for hypersonic rarefied flows is presented and its implmentation on a Connection Machine is described. The implementation simulates ideal diatomic Maxwell molecules with three translational and two rotational degrees of freedom. Results for a 2-D simulation of supersonic flow over a 30 deg wedge are presented and used for validation.

Dagum, Leonardo↗

NASA NTRS1989

Implementation of a hypersonic rarefied flow particle simulation on the Connection Machine

A very efficient direct particle simulation algorithm for hypersonic rarefied flows is presented and its implementation on a Connection Machine is described. The implementation simulates ideal diatomic Maxwell molecules with three translational and two rotational degrees of freedom. Results for a 2-D simulation of supersonic flow over a 30 deg wedge are presented and used for validation.

Dagum, Leonardo↗

NASA NTRS1991

Validation of chemistry models employed in a particle simulation method

The chemistry models employed in a statistical particle simulation method, as implemented in the Intel iPSC/860 multiprocessor computer, are validated and applied. Chemical relaxation of five-species air in these reservoirs involves 34 simultaneous dissociation, recombination, and atomic-exchange reactions. The reaction rates employed in the analytic solutions are obtained from Arrhenius experimental correlations as functions of temperature for adiabatic gas reservoirs in thermal equilibrium. Favorable agreement with the analytic solutions validates the simulation when applied to relaxation of O2 toward equilibrium in reservoirs dominated by dissociation and recombination, respectively, and when applied to relaxation of air in the temperature range 5000 to 30,000 K. A flow of O2 over a circular cylinder at high Mach number is simulated to demonstrate application of the method to multidimensional reactive flows.

Haas, Brian L.↗

NASA NTRS1990

Fundamentals of chemistry modeling applicable to a vectorized particle simulation

This paper describes the fundamentals of extending the vectorized particle simulation method derived by Baganoff and McDonald (1990), McDonald and Baganoff (1988), and McDonald (1989) for modeling chemically reacting flows. Details of reaction mechanics per reaction are presented, with particular attention given to the quantum nature of the vibrational mode. The models of reactive flows developed here were verified through a simulation of a superheated diatomic gas relaxing thermochemically to equilibrium in a reservoir.

Haas, Brian L.↗

NASA NTRS1991

Particle simulation in a multiprocessor environment

A parallel implementation of a particle simulation method that is portable between a wide class of multiprocessor computers is presented. A fine grain spatial decomposition is utilized where several subdomains having a regular structure are computed at each processing node. This leads directly to an efficient and straightforward load balancing scheme if the number of subdomains at each processor is permitted to vary in an appropriate manner. Three dimensional simulations incorporating full thermochemical nonequilibrium are possible using the resulting code. Vectorizable algorithms are retained from earlier work allowing efficient use of deeply pipelined node processors where available. Performance results are presented from three different machine architectures demonstrating the portability of the code. On a 128-node Intel iPSC/860, performance is twice that of a single Cray-Y/MP CPU running a highly vectorized simulation code. Speedup is linear over the full range of number of processors on all target machines, indicating scalability of the method to higher degrees of parallelism.

Mcdonald, Jeffrey D.↗

NASA NTRS1993

3D Electromagnetic Plasma Particle Simulations on a MIMD Parellel Computer

This paper describes computer particle simulation in plasma physics research; also discussed are the results of plasma wave radiation by a moving current source in a magnetized plasma.

N/A↗

NASA NTRS1995

Some Developments of the Equilibrium Particle Simulation Method for the Direct Simulation of Compressible Flows

The direct simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) method is the established technique for the simulation of rarefied gas flows. In some flows of engineering interest, such as occur for aero-braking spacecraft in the upper atmosphere, DSMC can become prohibitively expensive in CPU time because some regions of the flow, particularly on the windward side of blunt bodies, become collision dominated. As an alternative to using a hybrid DSMC and continuum gas solver (Euler or Navier-Stokes solver) this work is aimed at making the particle simulation method efficient in the high density regions of the flow. A high density, infinite collision rate limit of DSMC, the Equilibrium Particle Simulation method (EPSM) was proposed some 15 years ago. EPSM is developed here for the flow of a gas consisting of many different species of molecules and is shown to be computationally efficient (compared to DSMC) for high collision rate flows. It thus offers great potential as part of a hybrid DSMC/EPSM code which could handle flows in the transition regime between rarefied gas flows and fully continuum flows. As a first step towards this goal a pure EPSM code is described. The next step of combining DSMC and EPSM is not attempted here but should be straightforward. EPSM and DSMC are applied to Taylor-Couette flow with Kn = 0.02 and 0.0133 and S(omega) = 3). Toroidal vortices develop for both methods but some differences are found, as might be expected for the given flow conditions. EPSM appears to be less sensitive to the sequence of random numbers used in the simulation than is DSMC and may also be more dissipative. The question of the origin and the magnitude of the dissipation in EPSM is addressed. It is suggested that this analysis is also relevant to DSMC when the usual accuracy requirements on the cell size and decoupling time step are relaxed in the interests of computational efficiency.

Macrossan, M. N.↗

NASA NTRS1987

Macroscale particle simulation of kinetic Alfven waves

Two types of simulations of the kinetic Alfven wave are presented using a macroscale particle simulation code (Tanaka and Sato, 1986) which enables individual particle dynamics to be followed in the MHD scales. In this code, low frequency electromagnetic fields are solved by eliminating high frequency oscillations such as the light modes, and the scalar potential electric field is solved by eliminating Lagrangian oscillations. The dependences of the frequency and the Landau damping on the perpendicular wavenumber were studied, and good agreement was found between simulation and theoretical predictions. Some fundamental nonlinear interactions of the kinetic Alfven wave with the particles (parallel acceleration of the electrons) were also noted.

Tanaka, Motohiko↗

NASA NTRS1993

A comparative study of turbulence decay using Navier-Stokes and a discrete particle simulation

A comparative study of the two dimensional temporal decay of an initial turbulent state of flow is presented using a direct Navier-Stokes simulation and a particle method, ranging from the near continuum to more rarefied regimes. Various topics related to matching the initial conditions between the two simulations are considered. The determination of the initial velocity distribution function in the particle method was found to play an important role in the comparison. This distribution was first developed by matching the initial Navier-Stokes state of stress, but was found to be inadequate beyond the near continuum regime. An alternative approach of using the Lees two-sided Maxwellian to match the initial strain-rate is discussed. Results of the comparison of the temporal decay of mean kinetic energy are presented for a range of Knudsen numbers. As expected, good agreement was observed for the near continuum regime, but the differences found for the more rarefied conditions were unexpectedly small.

Goswami, A.↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Packing and flow particle simulations

Granular material is present across natural and industrial processes on Earth and other planets. Granular particles show up in space exploration (lunar regolith), avalanches (boulders), food (coffee), construction (concrete powder) and manufacturing (additive manufacturing powder, battery slurries). Important phenomena emerge from large collections of granular particles. The size scales of the particles in granular material, 10 μm diameter or larger, makes particle-based simulations a tractable computational method. This seminar will present the packing and flow of granular matter using particle-based discrete element modeling simulations. Particles modeled with rotational friction only require as few as 2.6 contacts for mechanical stability, as opposed to 6 contacts for frictionless particles. Optimal parameters for in-space manufacturing particulate material are identified. Specifically, the maximum density and contacts occurs for a large-to-small particle volume ratio of 0.265. Stress and contact fabric fluctuations of flowing dry granular matter have power-law scaling with strain rate, and a kink. The pressure-dependent slope change kink could identify the transition between slower, quasistatic and faster, inertial flows.

granular↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Packing and flow particle simulations

granular↗

NASA NTRS1990

A collision-selection rule for a particle simulation method suited to vector computers

A theory is developed for a selection rule governing collisions in a particle simulation of rarefied gas-dynamic flows. The selection rule leads to an algorithmic form highly compatible with fine grain parallel decomposition, allowing for efficient utilization of supercomputers having vector or massively parallel single instruction multiple data architectures. A comparison of shock-wave profiles obtained using both the selection rule and Bird's direct simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) method show excellent agreement. The equation on which the selection rule is based is shown to be directly related to the time-counter procedure in the DSMC method. The results of several example simulations of representative rarefied flows are presented, for which the number of particles used ranged from 10 to the 6th to 10 to the 7th demonstrating the greatly improved computational efficiency of the method.

Baganoff, D.↗

NASA NTRS1993

Particle simulation on heterogeneous distributed supercomputers

We describe the implementation and performance of a three dimensional particle simulation distributed between a Thinking Machines CM-2 and a Cray Y-MP. These are connected by a combination of two high-speed networks: a high-performance parallel interface (HIPPI) and an optical network (UltraNet). This is the first application to use this configuration at NASA Ames Research Center. We describe our experience implementing and using the application and report the results of several timing measurements. We show that the distribution of applications across disparate supercomputing platforms is feasible and has reasonable performance. In addition, several practical aspects of the computing environment are discussed.

Becker, Jeffrey C.↗

NASA NTRS1991

Particle simulations of collisionless magnetic reconnection in magnetospheric current sheets

The driven collisionless magnetic reconnection processes at the dayside magnetopause and in the magnetotail are investigated through 2.5 D particle simulations. During reconnection, magnetic field configurations with both a single X line and multiple X lines are obtained. Magnetic reconnection enhancements, which are indicated by the peaks in the inductive electric field, are observed in the simulations. Coincident with the magnetic reconnection enhancements, bursts of energetic particles, electrons with an energy spectrum of about E exp -3.8 and ions with an energy spectrum of about E exp -4.4, are generated during the reconnection processes. Field-aligned particle heat fluxes are also generated. Intense plasma waves associated with the reconnection processes are observed. It is found that the fluctuating magnetic field has a power spectrum of about f exp -3.8 and the fluctuating electric field has a power spectrum of about f exp -1.8, respectively. A review of the simulation studies of driven collisionless magnetic reconnection and slow shocks in the magnetospheric current sheets is presented.

Ding, D. Q.↗

NASA NTRS1993

Magnetosheath-ionspheric plasma interactions in the cusp/cleft. 2: Mesoscale particle simulations

Ionospheric plasma flowing out from the cusp can be an important source of plasma to the magnetosphere. One source of free energy that can drive this outflow is the injection of magnetosheath plasma into the cusp. Two-dimensional (three velocity) mesoscale particle simulations are used to investigate the particle dynamics in the cusp during southward interplanetary magnetic field. This mesoscale model self-consistently incorporates (1) global influences such as the convection of plasma across the cusp, the action of the mirror force, and the injection of the magnetosheath plasma, and (2) wave-particle interactions which produce the actual coupling between the magnetosheath and ionospheric plasmas. It is shown that, because the thermal speed of the electrons is higher than the bulk motion of the magnetosheath plasma, an upward current is formed on the equatorward edge of the injection region with return currents on either side. However, the poleward return currents are the stronger due to the convection and mirroring of many of the magnetosheath electrons. The electron distribution in this latter region evolves from upward directed streams to single-sided loss cones or possibly electron conics. The ion distribution also shows a variety of distinct features that are produced by spatial and/or temporal effects associated with varying convection patterns and wave-particle interactions. On the equatorward edge the distribution has a downflowing magnetosheath component and an upflowing cold ionospheric component due to continuous convection of ionospheric plasma into the region. In the center of the magnetosheath region, heating from the development of an ion-ion streaming instability causes the suppression of the cold ionospheric component and the formation of downward ionospheric streams. Further poleward there is velocity filtering of ions with low pitch angles, so that the magnetosheath ions develop a ring-beam distribution and the ensuing wave instabilities generate downward ionospheric conics. These downward ionospheric components are eventually turned by the mirror force, leading to the production of upward conics at elevated energies throughout the region.

Winglee, R. M.↗

NASA NTRS1993

(abstract) 3D Electromagnetic Plasma Particle Simulations

A 3D electromagnetic plasma particle-in-cell code has been developed using the General Concurrent PIC algorithm. The GCPIC algorithm uses a domain decomposition to divide the computation among the processors. Particles must be exchanged between processors as they move. The efficiencies for 1-, 2-, and 3-dimensional partitions of the three dimensional domain are compared, and the algorithm is found to be very efficient even when a large fraction (e.g., 30%) of the particles must be exchanged at every time step. This PIC code has been used to perform simulations of a variety of space plasma physics problems. Results of three applications will be discussed: 1) plasma disturbances induced by moving conducting bodies in a magnetized plasma; 2) plasma plume interactions; and 3) solar wind termination shock.

electromagnetic plasma particles simulations 3D al↗

NASA NTRS1992

Particle simulation of rarefied aeropass maneuvers of the Magellan spacecraft

Rarefied and free molecular flowfields corresponding to proposed aeropass maneuvers through the atmosphere of Venus by the Magellan spacecraft are computed with a vectorized particle simulation method. The significance of rarefaction and reaction effects are assessed and surface heat flux, drag coefficients, and flowfield properties are computed. A simple surface heat transfer model is coupled directly to the simulation and assumes that each surface element is in radiative equilibrium with deep space. This allows direct computation of surface temperature distributions rather than requiring prescribed isothermal boundary conditions. Uncoupled dual-node heat transfer models, which account for heat capacity and thermal conductivity within each structural component, permit more accurate determination of surface temperatures. Such temperatures restrict the allowable altitudes and entry speeds of the aeropass maneuvers, and must therefore be estimated accurately. Simulations with an entry velocity of 8600 m/s at altitudes between 125 and 140 km reveal that allowable surface temperatures occur only at the highest altitudes where the flowfield is appropriately modeled as free-molecular. Excessive surface heat flux occurs at lower altitudes where molecular collisions are significant.

Haas, Brian L.↗