Numerical Simulations of Spacecraft Charging

Accurately predicting the surface charging of spacecraft in an efficient manner remains a challenging task. Indeed, spacecraft geometries are often complex, and the important physics of surface charging can span a wide range... [ view full abstract ]

Accurately predicting the surface charging of spacecraft in an efficient manner remains a challenging task. Indeed, spacecraft geometries are often complex, and the important physics of surface charging can span a wide range of time and length scales. Present predictive capabilities are often either accurate or computationally efficient, but rarely both. Thus, the development of new predictive capabilities is warranted. To this end, we have developed a plasma-material interaction code to predict the surface charging of spacecraft. CPIC (Curvilinear Particle-In-Cell) is based on first-principles kinetic methods, and developed for curvilinear and multi-block meshes, which maintains accuracy. Its underlying numerical algorithms are parallelized, and carefully chosen in order to maximize computational efficiency. The spacecraft environment (SCE) can be specified in CPIC using the results from the Los Alamos National Laboratory SHIELDS framework. Complex multi-block meshes, which surround the spacecraft are generated using commercial software. Numerical results predicting the surface charging levels for the Van Allen Probes are presented.