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是一款全动力学静电式粒子网格（Particle-in-Cell, PIC）求解器，集成蒙特卡洛碰撞（Monte Carlo Collisions, MCC）模块，基于开源框架OpenFOAM开发，用于非平衡等离子体研究。该求解器遵循OpenFOAM的核心设计理念采用模块化架构，兼具高度灵活性与可扩展性：用户可在运行时自主选择不同计算方法，同时可依托模板化模块化类进行功能拓展。其采用有限体积法实现PIC方法，可在1至3维的任意几何结构上开展模拟。借助OpenFOAM的重心坐标粒子追踪技术，该求解器可高效完成从拉格朗日粒子基描述到欧拉场描述，以及反向的电荷与场量加权计算，无需使用计算成本高昂的粒子搜索算法。此外，picFoam还集成了适用于真实等离子体装置建模的通用开放式电路边界模型。