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.