This paper reports the recent development of a full-scale particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation package highlighting an efficient electro-statics (ES)-PIC implementation for spacecraft charging problems. Numerical simulations are crucial in studying plasma flows because analytical solutions are rare, and experiments are expensive. There are many types of plasma flow that need various numerical methods for efficient and accurate simulations; as such, how to implement and organize those different methods into one comprehensive simulation package is challenging. This work adopted several modern software design patterns and developed a versatile package that includes various PIC schemes. This package has an open architecture, clean interfaces with both serial and parallel simulation capabilities. Two benchmark test cases are included to demonstrate the capabilities of this package. Then two plasma flows around a positively charged probe are simulated, and the results are discussed. The simulation results are consistent with past simulation results, and new insights are obtained. This work can lead to the development and organization of more sophisticated plasma simulation solvers in the future.

中文翻译：

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用于航天器充电问题的并行粒子单元代码

本文报告了最近开发的全尺寸粒子单元 (PIC) 仿真包，重点介绍了针对航天器充电问题的有效静电 (ES)-PIC 实施。数值模拟对于研究等离子体流动至关重要，因为分析解决方案很少，而且实验成本很高。有许多类型的等离子体流需要各种数值方法来进行有效和准确的模拟；因此，如何将这些不同的方法实施和组织到一个综合仿真包中是具有挑战性的。这项工作采用了几种现代软件设计模式，并开发了一个多功能包，其中包括各种 PIC 方案。该软件包具有开放式架构、干净的接口，具有串行和并行仿真功能。包括两个基准测试用例来演示此软件包的功能。然后模拟了带正电探针周围的两个等离子体流，并对结果进行了讨论。仿真结果与以往的仿真结果一致，获得了新的见解。这项工作可以导致未来更复杂的等离子体模拟求解器的开发和组织。