Dr. Junxian Chew

Graduated from RWTH Aachen with M. Sc. Simulation Science, focusing on the development of a fully 3D first-principles Monte Carlo code to simulate the Townsend avalanche breakdown process. The Townsend avalanche involves an exponential ionisation rate due to electron-neutral impact ionisations, thus the need for the code to have good HPC scalability to handle the large number of particles. Extensive development of the code towards the simulation of a plasma breakdown scenario in a tokamak is further carried out in the doctoral research program, incorporating the gyromotions of charged particles in magnetised setting. The fine time resolution to fully resolve drift motions (avoiding the need for averaged drift terms) is made possible by the high scalability of the code, running on a large scale HPC system.

Experience gained from developing an MPI-OMP hybrid parallelised code and conducting simulations on JURECA DC is now directed towards supporting other scientific applications in their numerical studies.