Sensitivity Analysis in Plasma Chemistry: Application to Oxygen Cold Plasmas and the LoKI Simulation Tool

The
number of numerical models and their complexity
are increasing rapidly. This not only accompanies with a bigger impact
in various fields but also with a growing opacity. In the case of
a deterministic model with hundreds of inputs, it can become difficult,
while crucial, to identify which mechanisms are the most influential
on the results. Screening sensitivity analysis methods, such as the
Morris method, were developed to establish the ranking of inputs’
influence on a specified output. The advantages of these methods lie
in their easy adaptation to different model formulations or input
sets and in providing accurate rankings at relatively low computational
costs. In this work, a sensitivity analysis based on the Morris method
is applied to a cold oxygen plasma model. The robustness of the method
and some of its enhancements are tested, and the rankings obtained
are compared with other existing ones for similar conditions. Some
significant results are nonintuitive, which highlights the interest
of using well-designed sensitivity analysis to study, control, and
optimize complex systems.