SoPlasmaFoam: an OpenFOAM-based solver for streamer and dielectric barrier discharges with adaptive mesh refinement
2026-07-06 • Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
AI summaryⓘ
The authors present SoPlasmaFoam, an open-source software tool for simulating how plasma and dielectric materials interact. They analyze different numerical methods for better simulating charged particle transport, finding that a scheme called ROUNDF works best for streamer simulations. They also improve how the software couples electric field calculations with particle movement to ensure accuracy. Additionally, they introduce a new boundary condition that improves simulations where particle drift dominates. The solver is tested on standard plasma cases and shows good performance and flexibility for various plasma applications.
plasmadielectricdrift-diffusion-reactionPoisson equationstreameradaptive mesh refinementboundary conditionconvective schemefinite volume methodOpenFOAM
Authors
R. Pasolari, K. Kourtzanidis
Abstract
SoPlasmaFoam is an open-source, multi-region plasma-dielectric solver built on OpenFOAM, integrated with the PETSc linear-algebra suite (CPU and GPU back-ends), the blastAMR adaptive-mesh-refinement library (hexahedral and polyhedral meshes), and the ROUND family of high-resolution convective schemes. It solves drift-diffusion-reaction transport for charged species, coupled self-consistently to Poisson's equation explicitly or semi-implicitly, with plasma and dielectric regions joined by a monolithic multi-domain coupling for arbitrary curved interfaces. This work makes three contributions. First, a systematic assessment of convective schemes on a stiff scalar-advection problem and the positive-streamer benchmark shows that Scharfetter-Gummel is stable but excessively diffusive on coarse meshes, while ROUNDF outperforms all tested TVD limiters and is recommended for streamer transport. Second, an analysis of Poisson-transport coupling shows that fixed-point correction loops critically control accuracy, that a semi-implicit Poisson formulation does not remove this requirement, and that coupling must be tightened even when Courant and dielectric-relaxation numbers are well below unity. Third, a drift-robust wall boundary condition acting on discretized matrix coefficients is introduced, remaining accurate in the drift-dominated limit where conventional mixed-boundary mappings fail. The solver is validated against a low-pressure DC glow discharge and the positive-streamer benchmark, and its multi-region capability is demonstrated on a nanosecond surface dielectric barrier discharge. Performance analysis confirms memory-bound finite-volume scaling and shows that with AMR the solver is competitive with the fastest reported plasma codes. The framework provides a modular foundation for multiphysics simulations in plasma-assisted combustion, plasma processing, and plasma-based flow control.