High Order fluid simulation of multicomponent air plasma-sheath formation

Simulating the phenomena leading to the formation of sheath of complex mixtures (like the one characterizing air plasmas) in contact with walls is a challenge that is of great interest for many different fields, ranging from electric propulsion to thermal protection systems, from microelectronics to energy production system. To the common challenges that the plasma-sheath interaction present, namely the inertia disparity of the species involved and the small dimension of the charge separation zone, the interaction of multiple species, that vary in terms of both charge and mass, must be accurately described. For these reasons we chose to implement a multicomponent diffusion approach, that naturally accounts for every species interaction at the same time while reducing the number of equations with respect to the more common multifluid one, in a Discontinuous Galerkin framework, that allows to efficiently describe sharp gradients in the solutions, with an accurate Runge-Kutta time discretization scheme.