Fluid boundary conditions in kinetic-diffusion Monte Carlo

Abstract

The Kinetic-Diffusion Monte Carlo (KDMC) method is a powerful tool for simulating neutral particles in fusion reactors. It is a hybrid fluid-kinetic method that is significantly faster than pure kinetic methods at the cost of a small bias due to fluid approximations. Unfortunately, when simulating particles close to a boundary, it needs to switch to a purely kinetic method, which is significantly slower. In this paper, we will extend the method so that it can accurately take boundary conditions into account without switching to a purely kinetic method. Experiments show that this extension can lead to a speedup of up to 500 times compared to a KDMC method that switches to a purely kinetic method, while not sacrificing too much accuracy.