There’s a lot of demand in plasma/accelerator science to simulate space charge through so-called particle-in-cell model (which is somewhat like finite element analysis in structural dynamics etc) Many of them, for example fbpic uses Python for the apparent advantage for scientists users and for per…

I know, that’s why I posted the link. :slight_smile:

This paper has some nice pictures https://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.7866.pdf , and it’s got Hartmut Ruhl and Amitava Bhattacharjee on the author list. They know their stuff. It covers the basics of particle shapes and mapping quantities from the grid to particle and vice-versa. All the gory details are in …

[image] jcook: under development. I know that the Julia FEM package is crying out for developers, and really feel as though that should be the ultimate goal. I’m not sure what you mean here. FDTD is not really finite elements, and PIC isn’t finite elements either.

I should be clearer. In PIC moments of the distribution function gathered from particles are projected onto any grid. Then any grid will do. FDTD is the easiest to implement but there shouldn’t be any restriction to generalise to FEM, except some extra coding trickiness for dealing with shape functi…

I believe that FDTD relies on the “nested” character of the Cartesian grid. It gives it the conservation properties that make it a success. I think you’re right, PIC should be able to work with any grid at all. I’m not sure though that it will necessarily lead to a more efficient code. Part of the…

Could you explain what you mean by nested and graded grids? Do you mean adaptive mesh refinement? Regarding conservation, explicit Cartesian FDTD plasma PIC codes can be formulated to exactly conserve either momentum or energy but not both. I’m most familiar with the momentum conserving kind. With …

I am possibly making an unjustified assumption that this is a topic of general interest, as it is only tangentially related to Julia. Perhaps this should be discussed through private messages? The FDTD method relies on the “staggered” (or nested) grids for the dual quantities. That works well when …

Perhaps the conversation is getting a bit narrow, but I’m hoping it will catch some attention and gather some momentum. The FDTD method relies on the “staggered” (or nested) grids for the dual quantities. That works well when the grid is Cartesian. The same outcome can be achieved with FEM grids…

So far I think there are very few alternatives to FDTD.

[image] PetrKryslUCSD: I am possibly making an unjustified assumption that this is a topic of general interest, as it is only tangentially related to Julia. Perhaps this should be discussed through private messages? Personally I find these kind of topics fascinating and the scientific/numeric…

PIC (particle-in-cell), space charge tracking simulation?

Specific Domains Numerics

LaurentPlagne June 24, 2020, 8:30am 30

Hi @PetrKryslUCSD and @weymouth, I finally put the repo containing the GMG prototype on github.

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PIC (particle-in-cell), space charge tracking simulation?

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