Particle simulation of ion thruster optical system using single linked list

At present the PIC method is often adopted in the numerical simulation of ion thruster optical system. In the PIC method, the movement of the single particles needs to be traced, so the information of particles must be saved. In the traditional particle simulation program array is used to save the information of particles, in which the disadvantage is that the array can not adapt to the variation of the particle quantity. In this paper, a particle simulation program based on linked list storage structure is developed, in which the single linked list is used as the save method. Based on this method, the plasma particle simulation of ion thruster optics is carried out by PIC method, so that the feasibility of applying the linked list method to the particle simulation is validated. The simulation results show that if the linked list method is used in the particle simulation, (1) the program will adapt to the variation of the total particle number, so there will be no pre-specification of the maximal particle number and no pre-calculation, and also the calculation time will be saved; (2) there is no consumption of the memory resource, so the storage efficiency and calculation efficiency is enhanced.