AETHER: Inductively Coupled Plasma Simulation Software
by Emre Turkoz, Murat Celik

An in-house code is developed to simulate the inductively coupled plasma (ICP), focusing on the discharge chamber of a Radio-Frequency (RF) ion thruster. The modeling effort consists of three submodels, which are namely the fluid model, the electromagnetic model and the transformer model. Fluid equations are solved to evaluate the plasma ow parameters, whereas the electromagnetic model handles the calculation of the electromagnetic fields and the transformer model captures the effect of the matching circuit utilized in the real life experiments for constant power deposition. The equations are discretized with the finite volume method and the resulting linear systems are solved with iterative solvers in- cluding Jacobi and GMRES. The solved equations are continuity and momentum for ions and neutrals, electric potential equation, energy equation for electrons, and magnetic vec- tor potential equation to evaluate the electromagnetic fields. The code is written using the C++ programming language, works in parallel and has graphical user interface. The results obtained from the developed model are verified with commercial software results.