Kinetic Analysis of Weakly ionized Plasmas in presence of collecting walls

Description of plasmas in contact with a wall able to collecting or emitting charged particles is a research topic of great importance. This situation arises in a great variety of phenomena such as the characterization of plasmas by means of electric probes, in the surface treatment of materials and in the service-life of coatings in electric thrusters. In particular, in this work we devote attention to the dynamics of an argon weakly ionized plasma in the presence of a collecting wall. It is proposed a kinetic model in a 1D1V planar phase-space geometry. The model accounts for the electric field coupled to the system by solving the associated Poisson's equation. To solve numerically the resulting non-linear system of equations, the Propagator Integral Method is used in conjunction with a slabbing method. On each interrelating plasma slab the integral advancing scheme operates in velocity space, in such a way that the all the species dynamics dominating the system evolution are kinetically described. (paper)