École Nationale Supérieure de
Techniques Avancées

Abstract

This work applies adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) to the simulation of plasma streamer discharges in the context of a massively parallel unstructured solver. The drift-diffusion transport equation that comes from the plasma fluid model is solved by the Lax-Wendroff scheme with flux limiters in AVBP. This scheme is robust against mesh distortions but exhibits lower convergence speed on unstructured meshes. The AMR framework of AVBP has been adapted to plasma simulations. The refinement is designed to focus on the streamer head and edges. This approach is validated on multiple test cases, effectively capturing both positive and negative streamers in varying electric fields as long as the case is not too steep. It is demonstrated that AMR can reduce computational time by two to six times,depending on the required precision.