Speaker
Description
In the present work, we present a computational model for studying reactive and partially ionized plasmas in thermo-chemical nonequilibrium under the effect of electromagnetic fields, such as in astrophysics or fusion-related applications. In order to tackle the non-equilibrium effects present in such a plasma, we adopt a multi-fluid formulation including electromagnetic effects. Multi-fluid equations consider each species within the mixture as behaving as different fluids, interacting among each other by means of collisions and chemical reactions. In the present poster, we will present a two-fluid model, accounting for ions and neutral species. The model includes chemical reactions for characterizing ionization, recombination and charge exchange collisions and accurate transport fluxes, obtained through the Grad’s method and considering the anisotropy introduced by the magnetic field in the ionized species. The resulting equations are coupled to the full Maxwell’s equations in order to capture phenomena such as electromagnetic waves or charge separation effects, neglected in standard magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) simulations. Our computational model will be used to simulate magnetic reconnection testcases which have been proposed in recent literature and for which reference numerical simulations are available with more simplified models (including our recently published two-fluid model).
