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

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

Instructions

picFoam requires OpenFOAM version 9.

For OpenFOAM version 10 checkout the branch openfoam-v10 (Note: The branch was tested for compilation only!)

Detailed installation instructions for OpenFOAM can be found here.

OpenFOAM installation

Summery of the OpenFOAM installtion (link above):

1. Compiler: GCC version > 5.4 or above; or LLVM Clang version > 3.6 or above; or Intel ICC version > 17.0.4 or above

2. Package dependencies (for Ubuntu version 18.04 or above):

   OpenFOAM:
   
    build-essential
    cmake
    git
    ca-certificates
    flex
    libfl-dev
    bison
    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
   

3. Clone OpenFOAM repositories (recommended installation directory $HOME/OpenFOAM): git clone https://github.com/OpenFOAM/OpenFOAM-9.git git clone https://github.com/OpenFOAM/ThirdParty-9.git

4. Set the environment variables: source $HOME/OpenFOAM/OpenFOAM-9/etc/bashrc

5. Compile Scotch/PT-Scotch: Run the Allwmake script in $HOME/OpenFOAM/ThirdParty-9

6. Compile OpenFOAM: Run the Allwmake script in $HOME/OpenFOAM/OpenFOAM-9

7. Compile ParaView: Run the makeParaView script in $HOME/OpenFOAM/ThirdParty-9

picFoam installation

Run the Allwmake script inside the picFoam directory.

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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.

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picFoam extension

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