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

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 perform 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.

picFoam是一款基于OpenFOAM开源框架的完全动态电静力粒子-网格（PIC）求解器，其中包含蒙特卡洛碰撞（MCC），适用于非平衡等离子体研究。该求解器采用模块化设计，其设计原理与OpenFOAM相同，具有高度灵活性，用户可在运行时选择不同的方法，并通过基于模板化模块类的构建实现扩展性。采用有限体积法的PIC方法实现，使得它能够在一至三维的任意几何形状上进行模拟。有效地利用OpenFOAM的质心粒子追踪，将基于拉格朗日粒子的电荷和场加权描述转换为欧拉场描述，反之亦然，而无需使用计算昂贵的粒子搜索算法。picFoam还包含开放和通用的电路边界模型，用于描述实际等离子体设备。