Software

ERMES is a Finite Element Method (FEM) solver for Maxwell’s equations with a wide range of applications. Developed originally at CIMNE (International Centre for Numerical Methods in Engineering), it has been successfully applied to problems in microwave engineering, bioelectromagnetics and electromagnetic compatibility. With the addition of electrostatic and cold plasma modules, it has found new applications in the design and analysis of tokamak fusion reactors, including the simulation of electric arcs and electromagnetic wave-plasma-wall interactions.

GM_Julia is a zero-dimensional chemistry reaction solver for low-temperature plasmas. It takes a list of reactions, some details on the plasma species, and evolves them in time. These systems can be computationally intensive due to the number of reactions and their disparate timescales: typical chemistry sets in GM_Julia are around 600 reaction equations, with rate coefficients spanning many orders of magnitude. This makes for very numerically stiff systems, requiring specialised solvers. The original author made the decision to use Julia in order to take advantage of OrdinaryDiffEq.jl’s Rosenbrock integrators, designed for stiff systems.

RSECon24 featured a satellite event called Back to the Fortran Future which brought together a number of Fortran developers to discuss the challenges facing the community and plan some actionable solutions. The same few problems were raised repeatedly:

SIKE (Scrape-off layer Impurities with Kinetic Electrons) is a simple atomic kinetics solver for impurity species relevant to magnetic fusion plasmas. It is intended to study the effect of non-Maxwellian electron distributions on mean ionisation, radiative loss rates, amongst other properties.

FELTOR (Full-F ELectromagnetic code in TORoidal geometry) is a physics simulation package that uses discontinuous galerkin methods to solve plasma physics problems. As a modular system, it has a large range of potential applications, but it is primarily used to investigate plasma turbulence via gyrofluid equations.