3-D Electromagnetic Particle-in-cell Calculations Using Non-orthogonal Unstructured Grids

The authors are continuing to develop electromagnetic plasma simulation techniques applicable to geometrically complex domains discretized by a non-orthogonal, unstructured, mixed-polyhedral mesh. Maxwell`s curl equations are advanced in time using the recently developed discrete surface integral (DSI) method. This algorithm preserves, in the absence of particles, the electric and magnetic field divergence constraints and is a direct generalization of the standard staggered-grid finite-difference method. The plasma is represented by particles which move through the unstructured grid obeying all of the normal particle-in-cell approximations. They show details of the DSI field algorithm and of the method for tracking and weighting particles on the distorted mesh elements. Several numerical examples will be presented which demonstrate the present capabilities to integrate the DSI and PIC algorithms. Preliminary calculations which include particle field emission and wave boundary conditions will be presented.