Kinetic modeling of dust grain dynamics in electrostatic sieving

A new kinetic particle modeling framework was developed to investigate electrostatic transport of lunar regolith dust particles with applications to the concept of electrostatic sieving. The new approach is based on kinetic particle dynamics and includes major modules of sampling the particle size distribution, solving electric fields, and tracking motion of charged dust grains. A case study for a concept of electrostatic sieving was chosen to validate the new model. The simulation achieved similar performance of particle size classification as reported in the literature. The new model is computationally efficient (takes a few minutes on a PC-type laptop computer) so that researchers can use it as a design and analysis tool to explore large parameter space for system optimization.