Speaker
Description
Electron beam driven plasmas are rich in complex physics, including atomic physics, molecular physics, plasma physics, collisions, plasma chemistry, thermodynamics, and scattering. The study of such a system is paramount for understanding and modeling of ionospheric physics and low-temperature plasmas. A reduced order model known as the rigid beam model has recently been developed by NRL to capture the relevant physics of such systems while greatly reducing the simulation times [1]. Such models require electron scattering cross sections to compute reaction rates to track the state of the gas during a simulation. There exists variability in these cross sections as reported for nitrogen in the published literature, which is a source of uncertainty. In this work, a characterization of the uncertainty in the electron scattering cross sections for nitrogen will be presented. Using this uncertainty characterization, a basic forward propagation uncertainty quantification technique is then applied to the rigid beam model. In this method, the rigid beam model is run many times to build probability density functions for the quantities of interest, such as the electron density or the net current. This work will then report on these probability density functions and compare them to previously published simulation and experimental results.
[1] A. S. Richardson et al., “Modeling intense-electron-beam generated plasmas using a rigid-beam approximation,” Phys. Plasmas 28 093508 (2021).
