Development of a parallel implicit solver of fluid modeling equations for gas discharges

A parallel fully implicit PETSc-based fluid modeling equations solver for simulating gas discharges is developed. Fluid modeling equations include: the neutral species continuity equation, the charged species continuity equation with drift-diffusion approximation for mass fluxes, the electron energy density equation, and Poisson's equation for electrostatic potential. Except for Poisson's equation, all model equations are discretized by the fully implicit backward Euler method as a time integrator, and finite differences with the Scharfetter-Gummel scheme for mass fluxes on the spatial domain. At each time step, the resulting large sparse algebraic nonlinear system is solved by the Newton-Krylov-Schwarz algorithm. A 2D-GEC RF discharge is used as a benchmark to validate our solver by comparing the numerical results with both the published experimental data and the theoretical prediction. The parallel performance of the solver is investigated.