FLUID PLASMA

A simple Matlab class for a fluid charged species with convenience methods. Useful for plasma fluid models.

Installation

Installation requires simply that you download FLUID_PLASMA and add the base directory (the one that contains the +fluid_plasma directory) to your Matlab path.

Dependencies

A recent version of Matlab is needed to run the code. The code has been developed in Matlab 2016a Academic version.

FLUID_PLASMA depends on other Matlab packages that you can download from our GitHub account: utilities and constants_and_units. These packages must be installed and added to your Matlab path beforehand.

Usage

The fluid_plasma package contains two Matlab classes:

• The species class models a simple plasma fluid species (can be ions or electrons). It basically has mass, charge, and defines the thermodynamics of the species.
• The plasma class stores one ion species and N electron species (to allow for more flexible electron models), and adds a method to compute the sonic velocity in the plasma and Debye length.

A new way of selecting the thermodynamic model has been implemented in 20170625, which basically depends on the value of gamma. The old mechanism has been removed. This may impact other codes that depend on fluid_plasma.

Usage is straight forward. Start by creating a plasma object and setting its parameters, then call one of its methods:

p = fluid_plasma.plasma; % Create the default plasma object
p.electrons{1}.T(1); % query the temperature of the first electron species for 
electron density n=1

The current version is still preliminary and contains some known bugs.

Testing

Unit tests are found in the /test subdirectory. After adding the package to your Matlab path, you can run all tests by executing runtests from this subdirectory.

Contributing

If you have any comments for improvement or are interested in contributing to the continued development of this or any of my other codes, you can contact us through our website.

For updates and news, follow us on Twitter: @ep2lab..

License

Copyright (c) 2017 Mario Merino. The software is released as open source with the MIT License.