Kinetic scrape off layer simulations with semi-Lagrangian discontinuous Galerkin schemes

Abstract

In this paper we propose a semi-Lagrangian discontinuous Galerkin solver for the simulation of the scrape off layer for an electron-ion plasma. We use a time adaptive velocity space to deal with fast particles leaving the computational domain, a block structured mesh to resolve the sharp gradient in the plasma sheath, and limiters to avoid oscillations in the density function. In particular, we propose a limiter that can be computed directly from the information used in the semi-Lagrangian discontinuous Galerkin advection step. This limiter is particularly efficient on graphic processing units (GPUs) and compares favorable with limiters from the literature. We provide numerical results for a set of benchmark problems and compare different limiting strategies.