In memory of Professor David Alexander Yuen

David Alexander Yuen was born on June 14,1948,in Shanghai during the Chinese Civil War.His family moved to Hong Kong the following year.Thanks to the help of Senator Mike Mansfield,a Democrat from Montana,who met Dave's father during World War II,the entire family of seven moved to New York City in 1956.Dave showed much enthusiasm as a student,graduating from Xavier High School in Lower Manhattan in 1965,along with other successful Americans such as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.Dave proceeded to Caltech to study chemical physics and then moved to the chemistry department at the University of California,Berkeley in 1969,where the beginning of the plate tectonics revolution inspired him to change his focus to geophysics.

Pre-breakdown to stable phase and origin of multiple current pulses in argon dielectric barrier discharge

We report on the results of numerical models of the(i)initial growth and(ii)steady state phases of atmospheric-pressure homogeneous dielectric barrier discharge in argon.We employ our new inhouse code called Py DBD,which solves continuity equations for both particles and energy,shows exceptional stability,is accelerated by adaptive time stepping and is openly available to the scientific community.Modeling argon plasma is numerically challenging due to the lower speeds of more inertial ions compared to more commonly modeled neon and helium,but its common use for plasma jets in medicine makes its modeling compelling.Py DBD is here applied to modeling two setups:(i)the exponential growth from natural electron-ion seeds(onset phase)until saturation is reached and(ii)the multiple current pulses that naturally appear during the steady state phase.We find that the time required for the onset phase,when the plasma density grows from 10^(9)m^(-3)to 10^(17)m^(-3),varies from 80μs at 4.5 k V down to a fewμs above 6.5 k V,for voltage frequency f=80 k Hz and gap width d_(g)=0.9 mm.At the steady state,our model reproduces two previously observed features of the current in dielectric barrier discharge reactors:(1)an oscillatory behavior associated to the capacitative character of the circuit and(2)several(N_(p))current pulses occurring every half sinusoidal cycle.We show that the oscillations are present during the exponential growth,while current pulses appear approaching the steady state.After each micro-discharge,the gas voltage decreases abruptly and charged particles rapidly accumulate at the dielectric boundaries,causing avalanches of charged particles near the reactor boundaries.Finally,we run a parametric study finding that N_(p)increases linearly with voltage amplitude V_(amp),is inversely proportional to dielectric gap d_(g)and decreases when voltage frequency f increases.The code developed for this publication is freely available at the address https://github.com/gabersyd/PyDBD.

Models of plate tectonics with the Lattice Boltzmann Method

Modern geodynamics is based on the study of a large set of models,with the variation of many parameters,whose analysis in the future will require Machine Learning to be analyzed.We introduce here for the first time how a formulation of the Lattice Boltzmann Method capable of modeling plate tectonics,with the introduction of plastic non-linear rheology,is able to reproduce the breaking of the upper boundary layer of the convecting mantle in plates.Numerical simulation of the earth’s mantle and lithospheric plates is a challenging task for traditional methods of numerical solution to partial differential equations(PDE’s)due to the need to model sharp and large viscosity contrasts,temperature dependent viscosity and highly nonlinear rheologies.Nonlinear rheologies such as plastic or dislocation creep are important in giving mantle convection a past history.We present a thermal Lattice Boltzmann Method(LBM)as an alternative to PDE-based solutions for simulating time-dependent mantle dynamics,and demonstrate that the LBM is capable of modeling an extremely nonlinear plastic rheology.This nonlinear rheology leads to the emergence plate tectonic like behavior and history from a two layer viscosity model.These results demonstrate that the LBM offers a means to study the effect of highly nonlinear rheologies on earth and exoplanet dynamics and evolution.