Speaker
Description
We are developing the Topanga code for predicting E3 electromagnetic pulse building on our experience with hybrid plasma simulation. The E3 component has a long pulse, lasting tens to hundreds of seconds. It is caused by the nuclear detonation's temporary distortion of the Earth's magnetic field. The E3 component has similarities to a geomagnetic storm caused by a solar flare. Like a geomagnetic storm, E3 can produce geomagnetically induced currents in long electrical conductors, damaging components such as power line transformers. Our new code’s attributes include the following: spherical geometry for simplified boundary conditions and computational efficiency; couples a hybrid plasma model (fluid electrons and neutrals, particle ions, Ohm’s law, and reduced Maxwell’s equations) to a finite-difference time-domain electromagnetic solver (FDTD-EM); uses the International Geomagnetic Reference Field magnetic field model, neutral atmosphere profiles from the US Standard Atmosphere or the NRL MSISE (mass spectrometer and incoherent scatter radar + exosphere) model, ionosphere profiles from the International Reference Ionosphere model; has ion-neutral, electron-ion, electron-neutral collisions; uses a fluid algorithm for motion of the neutral atmosphere; and has limited atmospheric chemistry. An overview of the code and simulations examples with some comparison to experimental data will be presented.
This work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under contract DE-AC52-07NA27344 and by Los Alamos National Laboratory under contract DE-AC52-06NA25396.
