Improved Electromagnetic PIC Particle Current Weighting Near Conformal Boundaries

The proposed work addresses the need for a comprehensive particle simulation software package which provides advanced geometry meshing techniques to reduce inaccuracies encountered using standard orthogonal Cartesian FDTD grids. Currently there exists a void in commercial PIC software. Government and private researchers of plasma and particle physics find themselves spending many man-hours developing complex computational codes and algorithms to fit their specific needs. The goal of the proposed work is to provide plasma and particle physicists with a comprehensive software package which will provide a full range of numerical solutions with an easy to use graphical user interface and powerful visualization capabilities. The computational approach will be based on the kinetic description of plasmas and use particle simulation techniques such as PIC and Monte Carlo methods. These particle simulation algorithms will be implemented alongside Remcom Inc.’s current full-wave three-dimensional FDTD solver, XFDTD. XFDTD includes advanced CAD modeling and import, accelerated meshing routines, adaptive meshing capabilities, conducting, UPML and periodic boundary conditions, and thorough result visualization. These existing capabilities will provide a strong foundation for the inclusion of the aforementioned particle simulation methods and allow for a quick evaluation of newly developed FDTD/PIC grids.