picFoam: An OpenFOAM based electrostatic Particle-in-Cell solver

TL;DR

picFoam is an open-source, flexible electrostatic Particle-in-Cell solver based on OpenFOAM, capable of simulating non-equilibrium plasmas in complex geometries with modular and extendable design.

Contribution

It introduces a modular, extendable PIC solver within OpenFOAM that supports arbitrary geometries and includes detailed boundary models for plasma device simulation.

Findings

Supports 1D to 3D simulations in arbitrary geometries.

Uses barycentric particle tracking for efficient charge and field calculations.

Includes open circuit boundary models for realistic plasma device simulation.

Abstract

picFoam is a fully kinetic electrostatic Particle-in-Cell(PIC) solver, including Monte Carlo Collisions(MCC), for non-equilibrium plasma research in the open-source framework of OpenFOAM. The solver's modular design, based on the same principles used in OpenFOAM, makes it highly flexible, by allowing the user to choose different methods at run time, and extendable, by building upon templated modular classes. The implementation of the PIC method employing the finite volume method, allows it to simulate on arbitrary geometries in one to three dimensions. OpenFOAM's barycentric particle tracking is used effectively to performe charge and field weighting from the Lagrangian particle based description to the Eulerian field description and backwards without computational expensive particle searching algorithm. picFoam also includes open and general circuit boundary models for the description of real plasma devices.