Plasma and Fusion Research

Volume 11, 2401096 (2016)

Regular Articles

Multi-Scale Simulations of Magnetic Reconnection Using Particle-in-Cell and Magnetohydrodynamics with Adaptive Mesh Refinement Technique

Tomoya OGAWA, Shunsuke USAMI¹⁾, Ritoku HORIUCHI¹⁾, Mitsue DEN²⁾ and Kazuyuki YAMASHITA³⁾

: Kitasato University, Sagamihara 252-0373, Japan
1): National Institute for Fusion Science, Toki 509-5292, Japan
2): National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Koganei 184-8795, Japan
3): University of Yamanashi, Kofu 400-8510, Japan

(Received 9 December 2015 / Accepted 27 April 2016 / Published 30 June 2016)

Abstract

We performed magnetic reconnection simulations with our simulation code. Our code is a multi-scale three-dimensional plasma simulation code in which Particle-in-Cell (PIC) method is used in a restricted region and magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) simulation is performed in the rest of a simulation box. A hierarchical mesh is used in the MHD region, which is controlled by an adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) technique. Restriction of the PIC region and the adaptively controlled mesh realize treatment both of micro-scale particle dynamics and macro-scale structure with low computational costs. In this paper, we describe methods of our simulation and results of calculations.

Keywords

multi-scale simulation, magnetic reconnection, PIC, MHD, AMR

DOI: 10.1585/pfr.11.2401096

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