A PIC-DSMC Approach for Ion Optics Simulations
by Firat Sik, Emre Turkoz, Murat Celik

An in-house code is implemented to simulate ion thruster accelerator grids which are utilized to generate thrust. The investigated grid system consists of a screen and an accelerator grid. A static potential dierence of 1000 V is applied between the grids which are separated by a few millimeters. The electric field is calculated by solving the Poissons equation for electric potential throughout the investigated domain. The domain is divided into cells in three dimensions, and Particle-in-Cell (PIC) method is applied to handle ions and neutrals which are represented with macroparticles in the system. Ions and neutrals are tracked with the Leapfrog method. Neutral-neutral and neutral-ion elastic collisions along with neutral-ion charge-exchange (CEX) collisions are incorporated into the model according to the Direct Simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) method. The code is implemented using C++ programming language and the implementation benefited greatly from the object-oriented design. The results are compared with the experimental results from the literature.