picFoam

picFoam is a fully kinetic electrostatic Particle-in-Cell(PIC) solver, including Monte Carlo Collisions(MCC), for non-equilibrium plasma research.

The solver is developed at ZARM (Center of Applied Space Technology and Microgravity, University of Bremen).

Publications

picFoam: An OpenFOAM based electrostatic Particle-in-Cell solver (preprint)

Instructions

picFoam requires OpenFOAM version 8.

Detailed installation instructions for OpenFOAM can be found here.

OpenFOAM installation

Summery of the OpenFOAM installtion (link above):

Compiler: GCC version > 4.8 or above; or LLVM Clang version > 3.6 or above; or Intel ICC version > 17.0.4 or above

Package dependencies (for Ubuntu version 18.04 or above):

OpenFOAM:

 build-essential
 flex
 bison
 git-core
 cmake
 zlib1g-dev
 libboost-system-dev
 libboost-thread-dev
 libopenmpi-dev
 openmpi-bin
 gnuplot
 libreadline-dev
 libncurses-dev
 libxt-dev

ParaView:

 libqt5x11extras5-dev
 libxt-dev
 qt5-default
 qttools5-dev curl

Clone OpenFOAM repositories (recommended installation directory $HOME/OpenFOAM): git clone https://github.com/OpenFOAM/OpenFOAM-8.git git clone https://github.com/OpenFOAM/ThirdParty-8.git
Set the environment variables: source $HOME/OpenFOAM/OpenFOAM-8/etc/bashrc
Compile Scotch/PT-Scotch: Run the Allwmake script in $HOME/OpenFOAM/ThirdParty-8
Compile OpenFOAM: Run the Allwmake script in $HOME/OpenFOAM/OpenFOAM-8
Compile ParaView: Run the makeParaView script in $HOME/OpenFOAM/ThirdParty-8

picFoam installation

Run the Allwmake script inside the picFoam directory.

picFoam tutorials

To run a tutorial execute the respective run.sh script. By default meshes are constructed with blockMesh, but Gmsh geometry files are also included.

If you wish to use the Gmsh geometry, installation of Gmsh version 3.0.6 is recommended. For newer versions run Gmsh with -format msh22 to output an older mesh format, which OpenFOAM can handle.

picFoam extension

If you wish to extend picFoam with new submodels see the file EXTENSION_INSTRUCTIONS.md.