A Nonlinear, Conservative, Entropic Fokker-Planck Model for Multi-Species Collisions
Dr. Cory Hauck
, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Abstract:
We introduce a multi-species Fokker-Planck model for simulating particle collisions in a plasma. The model includes various parameters that must be tuned. Under reasonable assumptions on these parameters, the model satisfies appropriate conservation laws, dissipates an entropy, and satisfies an H-Theorem. In addition, the model parameters provide additional flexibility that is used to match simultaneously momentum and temperature relaxation formulas derived from the Boltzmann collision operator for a binary mixture with Coulomb potentials. A numerical method for solving the resulting space homogeneous kinetic equation is also presented.
This is joint work with Evan Habbershaw (University of Tennessee-Knoxville), Jeff Haack (Los Alamos National Laboratory), and Jingwei Hu (University of Washington)
Speaker’s Bio:
Cory Hauck is the Group Leader of the Multiscale Methods and Dynamics Group in the Mathematics in Computation Section, of the Computer Science and Mathematics Division. He received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics in 2006 from the University of Maryland. His research focuses on computational aspects of kinetic theory and hyperbolic partial differential equations, with applications in radiation transport, gas dynamics, and plasma physics.
