The original and computationally efficient volume penalization technique Ref. [1], proposed for an isothermal plasma to recover the Bohm boundary condition at the plasma-obstacle interface, is extended to model 3D obstacles. It is then generalized to handle electron and ion temperatures in a 1D model. Results in 3D simulations show that the geometry of secondary limiter has an influence on the density and particle flux profiles, breaking its toroidal symmetry and introducing profile gaps of magnitude of 20%. On the other hand, the generalization of the penalization scheme to the non-isothermal case demands to deal with new Neumann conditions on the heat fluxes. Those boundary conditions require the introduction of new mask functions to ensure that the Bohm boundary condition remains satisfied. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.