Studies of the charging of a thin dust layer in a plasma

The present study is designed to extend Wilson's model to include refinements in the actual operational design of the simulation code itself and to include additional physics in order to assess the resulting electric field structure and grain charges. Most of the initial phases of the work have focussed on the fact that the code, though in principle reliable, suffers from severe time constraints, requiring as must as 10-50 hours of CPU time for typical runs on a VAX computer. It is likely that by staging the code into steps in which early steps are carried out crudely and later steps successively fine tuned the total CPU time can be cut significantly. Preliminary results indicate the possibility to cut CPU time to as much as 1/3 or 1/5 the former time. The original Wilson code has been carefully examined, tested and documented. Shortcuts and staging systems have been introduced and tested which should make the code produce more accurate results with a finer grid system than would have been feasible heretofor. Continued testing and implementation of these refinements will be carried out at the author's home institution in the near future. In addition to the effort at reducing CPU time to a manageable amount, work is in progress to include a dust-size distribution instead of assuming all dust grains have the same size.