Recent developments of DSMC within the reactive plasma flow solver PICLas

In order to enable the numerical simulation of rarefied plasma flows in thermal and chemical non-equilibrium, electro-magnetic interactions as well as particle collisions have to be considered. A common approach is to use particle-based methods. The Particle-in-Cell (PIC) method simulates charged collisionless gas flows by solving the Vlasov-Maxwell equation system while particle collisions in neutral reactive flows are treated by the Direct Simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) method. Therefore, PICLas is being developed, a coupled simulation code that enables three-dimensional particle-based simulations combining high-order PIC and DSMC schemes for the simulation of reactive, rarefied plasma flows. PICLas enables time-accurate simulations on unstructured hexahedral meshes and is parallelized for high-performance computing. In addition to an overview of PICLas, the current development status of the DSMC module is presented. This includes the relaxation of polyatomic gases, the extension of the chemical modeling to gas-surface interactions, and the implementation of steady-state detection routines.