ThunderBoltz DSMC simulation of pulsed discharges in N₂ with disorder induced heating

The study of gas heating in atmospheric pressure plasmas is traditionally focused on molecular chemistry to determine the evolution of temperature over nanosecond to microsecond timescales. It has been established [M. D. Acciarri et al 2023 Plasma Sources Sci. Technol. 32 115004] that another mechanism, disorder induced heating (DIH), is relevant to gas dynamics in atmospheric and high pressure plasmas. Recent work has investigated temperature contributions from disorder induced heating in Maxwellian global model simulations of pulsed nitrogen discharges. Here, we extend the simulation of DIH beyond a global model using the open source 0D DSMC code, ThunderBoltz. This is the first implementation of DIH into a non-Maxwellian, particle-based code and may serve as a milestone for the introduction of these effects into larger PIC-MCC efforts such as EMPIRE. Due to the fast timescale and small spatial scale of DIH interactions, particle-based simulation of DIH is difficult to simulate directly, so we adapt the temperature scaling models developed from molecular dynamics simulation into the Monte Carlo collision routines of ThunderBoltz and compare the chemical-kinetic evolution of a plasma pulse previously studied with global models.