Particle simulation of ion thruster using parallel computation on graphic processor unit

A numerical simulation has been conducted using the particle-in-cell with Monte Carlo collision (PIC-MCC) method to model charge-exchange (CEX) xenon ions in the plume of ion thruster. A parallel particle simulation code has been developed by using the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) for graphic processor unit (GPU). The random number is generated by the parallel Mersenne Twister pseudorandom number generator algorithm. The full approximation storage-algebraic multigrid method (FAS-AMG) is used to update the electric field. In an axis-symmetric(r-z) coordinate, the average ion current flux is 4.5×10-5 A/m2 at z=0 m, and GPU’s result agrees well with CPU’s. Compared with a single CPU Intel Core 2 E6300, 16-processor GPU NVIDIA GeForce 9400 GT represents 4